Vehicle dynamic interaction with railway track embankment

This paper investigates the response of railway track to train loads while rested on an embankment. For this purpose, track structure was divided into two parts, in one of which the rail was modelled as a continuous Euler–Bernoulli beam and in another sleeper, ballast and embankment were considered as an integrated lumped masses system. To obtain the mass and stiffness of embankment, the ‘ballast pyramid model' was developed and, consequently, the response of the whole track system was investigated. The vehicle was assumed to be a ten-degree-of-freedom lumped masses system. The dynamic equilibrium equations of the vehicle-track coupling system were solved in the time domain and the track response was evaluated against applied dynamic loads. As a part of the study, a sensitivity analysis was undertaken on embankment parameters, namely embankment height, stiffness and damping. The results of numerical modelling and sensitivity analysis reveal that, among the aforementioned parameters, embankment height had a remarkable effect on the track dynamic response.