Reducing Impact Loads at Railway Crossings Using Tuned Resilient Elements

Abstract

The movement of wheels at crossing panels in a railway turnout lead to significant dynamic load amplifications. These in turn lead to high maintenance and unexpected delay costs as cast crossings suffer fatigue damage under repeated load cycles. While improvement to the crossing top surface design can help improve the load transfer and reduce the loads, it remains difficult to manage once on track and once wear and plastic deformation affect the wheel-rail performance. Instead, this work is proposing to introduce additional resilient elements in the zone where the wheel transfers over to the crossing nose, so as to reduce the effect of the dynamic impact loads and thus reduce a range of degradation modes. The effect of resiliently mounting the nose part is assessed using multibody dynamics simulation and shows substantial reduction in rail damage especially as vehicle speed increases. A proxy for first impact load in the form of the second derivative of wheel motion is also proposed.