A new methodology to estimate costs for wear and Rolling Contact Fatigue (RCF) on rails that cause a major portion of track maintenance costs is presented. It is demonstrated for a standard UIC-Y25 bogie and a FR8RAIL bogie, a softer and cross-braced iteration of the former. The rail profile evolution and the surface-initiated fatigue on the rail surface for different track radii with progressive tonnage are calculated using multi-body simulations. ‘Fastrip’ is used to calculate tangential stresses on the contact patch. Various non-linearities in the vehicle and track models have been considered, based on running conditions on the Swedish Iron-ore line. A cyclic rail grinding procedure at fixed tonnage intervals based on recommendations from EN13231-5 is implemented, to also account for the effect of track maintenance on the rate of rail surface damage. The wear depths (W), worn cross-sectional areas (A) and the number of axle passes that carry a risk for RCF initiation (Nr) are presented and discussed for 100 Mega Gross Tonnes passage. In doing so, the methodology addresses ‘track-friendliness’ of the running gear considering both its design and the track maintenance strategies.

Stora investeringar och omdaningar planeras i vårt transportsystem. Transporterna väntas öka starkt i framtiden och mera kapacitet måste skapas på ett hållbart sätt. Diskussionerna om vilka transportmedel som ska prioriteras, såväl som vilka objekt som vi ska satsa på, är livliga.

En viktig fråga är satsningen på Nya Stambanor avsedda för snabba persontransporter i de redan idag hårt belastade stråken Stockholm‒Göteborg och Stockholm‒Malmö, med ett stort antal mellanliggande orter. Denna typ av järnvägar finns redan eller planeras i de flesta av världens ledande ekonomier. Syftet med att bygga nya stambanor är att öka den totala kapaciteten för person- och godstrafik på järnväg, öka punktligheten och öka tillgängligheten genom korta restider. Det ger också förutsättningar för större regionala arbetsmarknader och ökat bostadsbyggande utanför storstäderna samt en bättre miljö. Nuvarande stambanor avlastas och lämnar plats för bl a effektivare godstransporter.

Denna rapport behandlar först järnvägens egenskaper. Järnvägen är det energieffektivaste transportmedel vi känner till, den tar liten plats och är mycket trafiksäker. Moderna tåg på modern bana är vårt snabbaste transportmedel till lands. Tåg kan bereda plats och komfort för arbete och avkoppling under resan. Enligt författarnas uppfattning bör dessa egenskaper göra järnvägen till ett förstahandsalternativ för effektiva och hållbara transporter i de segment där järnvägen är eller kan bli konkurrenskraftig.

Prognoser och analys, samt erfaren­heter från utlandet, visar att trafikunderlaget i Sverige är tillräckligt för nya stambanor. Med de förslagna banorna väntas järnvägens totala kapacitet öka till mer än det dubbla i de mest belastade stråken. En viktig faktor är att den snabba och långsamma tågtrafiken separeras. Denna åtgärd ger ökad kapacitet, utöver vad de dubblerade spåren ger, eftersom tågen kan köra tätare efter varandra och störningarna i tågtrafiken minskar.

Restiderna för orterna längs de nya stambanorna minskar kraftigt, i regel mellan 30 och 65%. Tillsammans med ökad turtäthet och minskade störningar ger det stora ökningar av tågtrafiken. De officiella prognoserna lider dock av ett antal allvarliga brister, varför både trafikökningen och den samhällsekonomiska lönsamheten beräkningsmässigt framstår som mindre än vad den enligt KTH:s prognoser och internationell erfarenhet borde vara.

Författarna anser att anläggningskostnaderna är rimliga i relation till nyttorna och jämfört med vad andra omställningar i samhällets transportsystem kostar. Detsamma gäller den engångs ”klimatskuld” som uppkommer vid de flesta satsningar för framtiden inom alla trafikslag. Nya transportslag i ett tidigt utvecklingsskede (elflyg, magnettåg, Hyperloop etc) är mycket osäkra beträffande när eller om de överhuvudtaget kommer att bli tillgängliga för användning i stor skala. I flera fall skulle krävas stora tekniska genombrott som vi idag inte känner till. Vi anser att man rimligen inte idag kan besluta att satsa på helt nya tekniska system för vilka framtiden är mycket osäker. Vi kan inte heller ”vänta och se”, eftersom ytterligare kapacitet behövs redan idag och ledtiderna är långa.

Sammanfattningsvis är de nya stambanorna ett samhällsbyggnadsprojekt och en del i transportsektorns nödvändiga omställning. De ger korta restider och effektiva transporter mellan våra största städer, liksom till och från ett stort antal mellanliggande orter, med omnejd. Godstransporterna kan också få plats på spåren och de kan utvecklas och effektiviseras. Det handlar om hållbar mobilitet för människor och gods i framtiden.

In this work, the authors present a methodology for assessing running gear with respect to rolling contact fatigue of wheels and rails. This assessment is based on the wheel/rail contact data of different wheel profile wear states obtained from a wheel profile prediction methodology. The approach allows a cumulative assessment of the rolling contact fatigue of rails in different curve radii (e.g. the sum of damage over the lifetime of wheel profiles). Furthermore, the assessment of the rolling contact fatigue can be undertaken at different wear states of the wheel profiles to provide an insight on how the rolling contact fatigue of wheels and rails varies depending on the evolution of wheel wear. The presented methodology is exemplarily applied to two bogie types, the UIC-Y25 standard bogie and the so-called FR8RAIL bogie with a mechanical wheelset steering device. The presented methodology has been shown to be a useful tool for the optimisation of vehicles already in an early stage of the vehicle development process.

In this paper, a Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) method is proposed for monitoring the vehicle running stability in a high-speed railway bogie. The objective is to detect and isolate the different faults of bogie components which are critical to vehicle stability, especially degraded yaw dampers and high equivalent conicity caused by wheel wear. The proposed method has two steps; firstly, signal features sensitive to the characteristics of running instability are extracted based on frequency domain and time domain analysis of lateral accelerations of bogie frame and axlebox; then these features along with vehicle speed are fed into machine learning based fault classifiers. The supervised machine learning based fault classifier are trained to identify the cause of observed running instability among yaw damper degradation and wheel-rail profile pair with high equivalent conicity. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier with Linear and Gaussian kernels are trained by k-fold crossvalidation method and the hyperparameters are optimized with a bayesian optimization algorithm to minimize the classification error. These fault classifiers are trained and tested with an extensive database generated from numerical experiments performed by multibody simulation (MBS) software. The performance of Linear and Gaussian SVM fault classifiers is compared with each other to identify the best performing classifier. The results underline the ability of machine learning based fault classifiers to be used for FDI of vehicle running instability and outline the possibility of detecting and isolating bogie faults critical to the vehicle stability based on onboard measurement of vehicle dynamic response.

The rolling stock in railway freight transport has traditionally been mainly characterised by lowcost, long lifetime of the fleet, and relatively low requirements on running behaviour. However, the sector inEurope has acknowledged that in order to be competitive there is a need to develop more advanced wagons thatenable to maximise payload and speed in different scenarios, while reducing the overall system costs, includingwheelset and track deterioration. In the Shift2Rail project FR8RAIL, a consortium of wagon manufacturers,wheelset manufacturers, and research centres has worked to develop a new generation of the widely used robustY25 freight running gear, that minimises maintenance costs both on the vehicle and the track by improving thecurving performance and hunting stability. The dynamic behaviour of the proposed solutions has been studiedwith simulations-based EN14363 tests up to 30 tons/axle, and their expected impact on wheel wear and fatiguehas also been predicted, with satisfactory results regarding both damage modes.

This paper addresses the control design for automatic train operation of high-speed trains with protection constraints. A new resilient nonlinear gain-based feedback control approach is proposed, which is capable of guaranteeing, under some proper non-restrictive initial conditions, the protection constraints control raised by the distance-to-go (moving authority) curve and automatic train protection in practice. A new hyperbolic tangent function-based model is presented to mimic the whole operation process of high-speed trains. The proposed feedback control methods are easily implementable and computationally inexpensive because the presence of only two feedback gains guarantee satisfactory tracking performance and closed-loop stability, no adaptations of unknown parameters, function approximation of unknown nonlinearities, and attenuation of external disturbances in the proposed control strategies. Finally, rigorous proofs and comparative simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

This work presents the initial steps given in order to obtain a comprehensive physical damage model for the specific case of wheel rail contact wear, which would be able to relate contact conditions, material properties and wear rates. The main advantage of a physical damage wear model is that wheelset and rail manufacturers can perform simulations in order to improve and optimise material properties for different operational cases. The work in this paper focuses on delaminative wear, starting with the importance and modelling of rough contact, and a comparison against classic smooth contact models.

Railhead becomes severely stressed due to localised contact loadings. This is more critical in the vicinity of endposts of an insulated rail joint. Popular IRJ endpost materials are fibreglass (fb), polytetrafluoroethylene (ptfe) and nylon66 (ny). A 3D finite element analysis is carried out to study stress distributions in railhead material near the endposts. The progressive damage parameter, von Mises stress and other residual stress and strain plots indicate that plastic deformation and material degradation occur at sub-surface levels of the railhead material. Although fb and ptfe are better endpost materials than ny, ny displays superior performance over the other two.

With the need for increasing length of freight trains, Longitudinal Train Dynamics (LTD) and its influence on the running safety becomes a key issue. LTD is a complex issue with contributions from both the vehicles and the operating conditions such as infrastructure design, braking regimes, etc. Standards such as the UIC Code 530-2 and EN-15839 detail the procedure for on-track propelling tests that should be conducted to determine the running safety of a single wagon. Also, it only considers a single S-curve and specifies neighbouring wagons and buffers. The resulting LTD would hence not be able to judge the effects of various heterogeneities in the train formation such as the adjacent wagons, buffer types, carbody torsional stiffnesses, curvatures, etc. Here, there is a potential of using three-dimensional multi-body simulations to develop a methodology to judge the running safety of a train with regards to its longitudinal dynamic behaviour, subjected to various heterogeneities. A tool based on three-dimensional multi-body simulations has been developed to provide Longitudinal Compressive Force (LCF) limits, tolerable LCF for wagon combinations passing through S-curves of varying curvatures and assess the sensitivities of the various heterogeneities present in the train. The methodology is applied to open wagons of the ‘Falns’ type on tight S-curves by calculating the corresponding tolerable LCF and the effect of various parameters on the same is discussed.

The number of operating high-speed trains in China is around 2800 today and 179,200 wheels are under maintenance in one reprofiling period. To help researchers to understand the evolution of the wheel profile and improve the reprofiling strategy of the wheels, this study predicts the development of wheel profiles on a high-speed train as function of mileage and compare simulated worn wheel profiles with measured ones. The methodology includes transient multi-body dynamic simulation, wheel-rail contact calculation and wear calculation with Archard's model. Calibrated by analysing measurements of worn S1002CN profiles and performing parameters sensitivity study in the wear model, the model is then used to predict the development of a recently designed wheel profile, called S1002CN-RF. The simulation results for S1002CN and S1002CN-RF show that the predicted wheel profiles coincide with the measured ones. Wear prediction of another high-speed wheel profile (LMA) validates that the vehicle performance with respect to wear could be further improved compared to using S1002CN or S1002CN-RF. Finally, the influence of track alignment and operating speed is investigated. The wear increases with the speed increasing up to 300 km/h, but stays almost constant with a further speed increase from 300 to 400 km/h.