Experimental settlement and dynamic behavior of a portion of ballasted railway track under high speed trains

The study of railway tracks under high speed trains is one of the most important researches in the domain of transport. A reduced scale experiment with three sleepers is presented to study the dynamic behavior and the settlement of ballasted tracks. A large number of trains passing at high speeds are simulated by signals, applied with the help of hydraulic jacks, having the shape of the letter M and representing the passages of bogies on sleepers. This experiment offers results such as displacements, accelerations, pressures and settlements that allow to better understand the dynamic behavior of a portion of a ballasted railway track at reduced scale and to estimate the settlement versus the number of load cycles. It was found that mechanical properties such as the global stiffness of the track can have important variations during the experiment. The settlement was also found to be a function of the acceleration of sleepers and above all it was observed, for accelerations above a critical value, that the increase of settlement per cycle was very high. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.