Adhesion between wheels and rails plays an essential role in the safe, efficient, and reliable operation of a railway network. Particularly under lubricated conditions, which can be a natural lubricant as water and an applied lubricant as rail oil, trains can experience adhesion loss. This paper presents an adhesion model constructed using the measured 3D wheel-rail surfaces. The numerical model comprises of three parts: a normally loaded contact model; an interfacial fluid model; and a rolling-sliding contact model. Simulation examples use the numerical model to investigate how water or oil contamination might affect wheel-rail adhesion in contacts with different surface roughness levels. Simulation indicates that adhesion peaks are almost at the same creep on different surfaces. The fluid load capacity is inversely proportional to the adhesion coefficient, both of which are clearly dependent on vehicle speed. Oil reduces adhesion coefficient more than water does. The adhesion coefficient on the low roughness surfaces is higher than that on the generated smooth surfaces under oil-lubricated conditions while it is the opposite for water-lubricated contact.

Adhesion in the wheel-rail contact is a key factor determining stable running conditions and safety during train driving and braking. This paper presents an experiment performed in a mini-traction machine to simulate the problems of low adhesion in the wheel-rail contact. Tests were conducted under dry conditions and using water or oil as lubricants to study the influence of surface roughness on the adhesion coefficient. The results indicate that the adhesion coefficient can be reduced to as low as 0.02 for smooth surfaces lubricated with water. For rougher contact surfaces, the water-lubricated tests indicate a higher adhesion coefficient than do oil-lubricated ones, but also a clear dependence on water temperature. The oil-lubricated tests indicate a very slight dependence of the adhesion coefficient on variation in rolling speed, temperature, and surface roughness.

Leaves on railway tracks affect the level of adhesion between the wheel and rail, especially in autumn. When crushed by wheels, leaves form a tarnished, low level of adhesion layer that sticks to the railhead and often requires mechanical removal. A Stockholm local traffic track with a long history of adhesion problems was subjected to field tests on railhead contamination. On five occasions under different conditions, spaced over a year, the friction coefficient was measured using a tribometer and samples of the rail were taken. The techniques of electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis and glow discharge optical emission spectrometry were conducted to determine the composition of the top layer of rail contaminants and hardness was measured using the nano-indentation technique. The tarnished layer contains much higher contents of calcium, carbon and nitrogen than do leaf residue layers and uncontaminated samples. These high element contents are generated from the leaf material, which chemically reacts with the bulk material. The hardness of the tarnished layer is one-fifth that of the non-tarnished layer of the same running band. A chemical reaction occurs from the surface to a depth of several microns. The thickness of the friction-reducing oxide layer can be used to predict the friction coefficient and extent of leaf contamination.