engleski

Influence of planum bearing capacity on track structure

The demand for improvement of the quality of railway transport, primarily regarding comfort and traffic speed, initiated numerous railway administrations to modernize their railway lines. The mentioned requirement motivated a large number of experts to consider the problem of track maintenance, all with the purpose of increasing safety and reducing the maintenance costs, particularly for classical track structures (tracks with the railway bed). Regarding maintenance of tracks, it is not sufficient to direct the attention only to maintenance of the superstructure. Installation of good quality rails, fastening systems, railway sleepers and ballast will have little effect if the substructure of tracks does not have a corresponding bearing capacity. Degradation of the substructure causes settlement of the track structure, and this mostly influences the deterioration of the track geometry. Due to the mentioned, during maintenance and reconstruction planning, the substructure must be considered equally important as the superstructure, because the instabilities of the track are most often the consequence of the planum deformations. The paper presents the research of the effects of the track substructure bearing capacity on behaviour of the track structure. Researches were carried out on the network of Hrvatske željeznice (Croatian Railways) (on the two-track railway Ivankovo – Vinkovci, Pan-European Corridor X) in the period from 2003 to 2008. Within the five-year research, continued measurements of settling of the tracks were made on selected measurement points, along with measurements of the track geometry. On the basis of processing of the data measured and the analyses carried out, it was ascertained to what extent does the bearing capacity of the substructure (subballast), expressed by the stiffness modulus, influence the behaviour of the track structure.

subballast; ballast track; planum deformations; maintenance

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