Failure and damage tolerance aspects of railway components

Railway structures such as rails and axles are safety relevant components since any failure includes the risk of catastrophic derailment. This paper gives a brief overview on the most important potential failure scenarios driven by fatigue crack initiation and propagation and discusses the effects of important influencing factors such as vehicle weight and speed, track quality and environmental conditions. The present paper summarizes earlier work of the authors in this field. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.