Development of New Passenger and Freight Train Load Models for Dynamic Assessment of Railway Bridges

Abstract

The dynamic response of a bridge to a train crossing needs to be assessed when planning new railway bridges on tracks with a line speed above or equal 120 km/h and when recalculating existing bridges for new train configurations planned to put into operation or when increasing the locally permissible line speed. In the assessment, the model trains HSLM-A and HSLM-B need to be applied as a sequence of moving loads on two- or three-dimensional mechanical models of the bridge structure as defined in Eurocode EN 1991-2. However, these load models were developed in the 1990s while in the last 25 years many new trains have been developed and put into operation with different configurations compared to the normative model trains in terms of axle distances and axle loads. As a result, the dynamic bridge response for actually operating trains can significantly exceed the permissible values, in particular the vertical bridge acceleration. The normatively regulated model trains HSLM-A and HSLM-B are therefore no longer adequate for the dynamic assessment of railway bridges, and there is an urgent need to develop new load models for passenger and freight trains, to cover the trains currently operating on the European railway network. For the reasons mentioned above, an international consortium consisting of TU Darmstadt, KU Leuven, AIT and REVOTEC was commissioned by the German Centre for Rail Transport Research (DZSF) in 2019 to develop new dynamic passenger and freight train load models for the dynamic calculation of railway bridges. This article presents the development steps carried out, the optimization methods used herein, as well as the validation of the newly developed load models on a large set of existing railway bridges.

Keywords:

• railway bridges
• train load model
• dynamic analyses
• train-induced vibrations
• bridge deck acceleration
• validation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the German Centre for Rail Traffic Research / Federal Railway Authority (EBA) for the funding as well as the members of the steering committee: EBA, DB Netz AG & ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG and the working group Vehicle & Bridge Dynamics for the excellent cooperation and the valuable technical discussions. Authors’ contribution: Michael Reiterer: Conceptualization, Abstract, the section “Validation of newly developed load models”, Conclusion, writing-original draft preparation, visualization; Maciej Kwapisz: the section “Development of load models”, writing-original draft preparation, visualization; Antonia Kohl: the section “Collection of passenger and freight trains”, the section “Selection of relevant passenger and freight trains”, writing-original draft preparation, visualization; Maximilian Rupp: Introduction, writing-review and editing; Andrei Firus: visualization, preparation of figures, writing-review and editing; Geert Lombaert: writing-review and editing; Alois Vorwagner: Introduction, writing-review and editing; Rinat Tukhbatullin: writing-review and editing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data of newly developed load model trains DLM-PT and DLM-FT are openly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10014440

 Google Scholar

.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Centre for Rail Traffic Research / Federal Railway Authority (EBA) under Grant 11vb/039-0099#001 (FE-Nr. 2019-T-1-1217, https://www.dzsf.bund.de/SharedDocs/Standardartikel/DZSF/Projekte/Projekt_28_dynamisches_lastenmodell.html).