—This paper presents one of the outcomes of a research project concerned with the development of a method for synthesizing, under controlled conditions in the laboratory, the random vibrations generated by road transport vehicles. It addresses some of the deficiencies and limitations of current random vibration synthesis methods used for evaluating and validating the performance of packaging systems. The paper deals with the development of a technique for decomposing non-stationary random vibration signals into constituent Gaussian elements. The hypothesis that random non-stationary vehicle vibrations are essentially composed of a sequence of zero-mean random Gaussian processes of varying standard deviations is tested and the paper reveals that the variations in the magnitude of the vibrations are the cause of the leptokurtic, non-Gaussian nature of the process. It is shown how non-stationary vibration signals can be systematically decomposed into these independent random Gaussian el...