Abstract
Rail infrastructure companies spend a substantial proportion of their operating budget on track maintenance and renewal. This could be reduced by extending the life and/or the maintenance interval of ballasted track and minimizing service disruption. A possible means to achieve this is with a fibre-reinforced ballast. Fibre-reinforced ballast is created by randomly introducing fibres to the granular matrix. If appropriately sized, these fibres may be held between grains and develop tensions that increase the effective confining pressure on the assembly. Previous laboratory research has shown that the addition of specific types, quantities and dimensions of fibres can increase the peak strength and reduce settlements of railway ballast. Based on laboratory test results, a field trial has been carried out at a site on a UK mass transit railway. The site was due for trackbed renewal which offered the opportunity to reinforce the replacement ballast with fibres consisting of polyethylene strips 300 mm × 25 mm × 0.5 mm at a concentration of 670 fibres per tonne of a standard ballast gradation. At the trial site, fibre-reinforced ballast was placed along a 48 m length. A further length was renewed with unreinforced ballast as a control. Following the installation, measurements of dynamic track movements as trains pass using a high-speed camera and digital image correlation were carried out on two visits. This paper presents an evaluation of the post-installation monitoring data. Results confirm that the fibre-reinforced ballast performs at least as well as the control section of track.
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Notes
- 1.
G44 sleepers are pretensioned, steel reinforced, concrete sleepers (ties). The major dimensions are 2500 mm long and 285 mm wide, with a height of 200 mm at the rail seat. They are a common sleeper used in UK track renewals and are comparable with national counterparts globally.
- 2.
When there are two tracks the term ‘6 ft’ (‘6 foot’) refers to the space between the two lines, 6 ft is not an actual measurement although 6 feet or approximately 1.8 m is the approximate distance between the two adjacent inner rails of the two lines. The term ‘cess’ refers to the area outside of either line. The term ‘4 ft’ (‘4 foot’) refers to the space between the running rails (gauge). The actual gauge is 1,435 mm (4 ft 8½ in).
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for the financial support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the programme grant Track to the Future (EP/M025276/1) and Network Rail through the University Research Partnership in Future Infrastructure Systems. The authors are also grateful for the support of the infrastructure owner, Transport for London (TfL), particularly Stephen Barber, for, enabling the trials to take place.
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Watson, G., Ferro, E., Le Pen, L., Milne, D., White, T.R., Powrie, W. (2022). Field Scale Trial of Fibre-Reinforced Ballast. In: Tutumluer, E., Nazarian, S., Al-Qadi, I., Qamhia, I.I. (eds) Advances in Transportation Geotechnics IV. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 164. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77230-7_38
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