Ž . Swiss Federal Railways SBB inspect their railway tracks at regular intervals. The first step of track renewal planning is a geotechnical study. Inspection is focused on the thickness of the ballast, on subsoil material penetrating upwards into the ballast and on geotechnical properties of subgrade and subsoil materials. Up to now, the inspection has been done mainly by digging trenches at e...

The maintenance of railway track is highly relevant for the service quality and safety. This task demands huge technical and human resources. Therefore an optimal deployment of the available resources is crusial for the cost-effectiveness of railway operation. Furthermore, the track geometry maintenance activities need to be planned up to two years in advance. For this reason the French railway...

car body acceleration is an important factor affecting track safety and ride comfort, which are two primary aspects of railway systems. though track level is an important source of wagon body acceleration, no quantitative relation between them is available and the aim of this paper is to propose a method to address this issue. to do so, car body acceleration is determined using a 10 dof simulat...

In this paper, a drive-by damage detection methodology for high-speed railway (HSR) bridges is addressed, to appraise the application of Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) extract Damage Index (DI). A finite element (FEM) 2D VTBI model that incorporates train, ballasted track and bridge behavior presented. The formulation includes irregularities damaged condition induced in specified st...

A failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) was applied to improve the design of concrete ties in ballasted track for North American heavy haul applications. A literature review was conducted on concrete tie failure modes, failure effects, and failure causes. A survey of railroads and transit authorities in North America provided a ranking of the most critical concrete tie failure modes. The most...

In an open railway access market, the provisions of railway infrastructures and train services are separated and independent. Negotiations between the track owner and train service providers are thus required for the allocation of the track capacity and the formulation of the services timetables, in which each party, i.e. a stakeholder, exhibits intelligence from the previous negotiation experi...

This paper describes a new approach to optimisation of railway track maintenance and renewal works via genetic algorithms. Decision support systems and genetic algorithms are used in this study to optimise railway track maintenance and renewal activities. The results obtained in the scope of this study show that planned maintenance and renewal management systems can be developed and successfull...

The optimal track allocation problem (OPTRA), also known as the train routing problem or the train timetabling problem, is to find, in a given railway network, a conflict-free set of train routes of maximum value. We propose a novel integer programming formulation for this problem that is based on additional ‘configuration’ variables. Its LP-relaxation can be solved in polynomial time. These re...