Railway ballast material selection and evaluation: A review

A New Technique for Quality Assessment of Railway Ballast Materials

The influence of main quality tests on the overall quality of railway ballast materials is assessed in this study. The need to integrate all acceptance tests in a unified manner for precise evaluation of ballast quality is identified, and a technique of performing this is proposed. Using this approach, a new ballast quality index (BQI) is defined in which, the main acceptance tests including ab...

Calibration Of Railway Ballast DEM Model

The ballast of the railway track is constantly changing due to dynamic forces of train traffic that results in the crushing of the rocks. The feasibility to simulate each particle makes the discrete element method (DEM) suitable for the task. Different DEM particle models are introduced in our paper and the adequate one was chosen. This new method is based on crushable convex polyhedral element...

Herbicide partitioning to concrete, asphalt and railway ballast

Laboratory evaluation of under-ballast mat effectiveness to mitigate differential movement problem in railway transition zones

Railway transition zones between open track and rigid structures such as bridges and culverts often experience differential movements due to abrupt changes in track stiffness and complicated dynamic loading effects. Such conditions commonly lead to track geometry issues, consequently increasing the magnitude of impact loads at these areas. This in turn leads to excessive degradation of ballast ...

Statistical monitoring for continual quality control of railway ballast

Existing quality controlmethods for railway ballast are arduous and expensive since they are based onmanual material inspections. Thus, test intervals are typically fairly wide. As a consequence, short-term andmid-term fluctuations of ballast quality may not be detected. This results in increased costs for maintenance work such as tamping. To make test intervals shorter and even allow for conti...