Rail Corrugation on North American Transit Systems

Investigation of the influence of rail pad stiffness on rail corrugation on a transit system

“…Grassie and Elkins [4] had theoretically predicted that a stiffness lower than 30 × 10 6 N/m would eliminate the wavelength studied in this case. This result has been confirmed.…”

“…The resulting corrugation frequencies are shown in Tables 1 and 2 for ballasted track and for concrete slab track, respectively. A similar methodology was used by Grassie and Elkins [4] to obtain the graphics which present the range of corrugation frequencies developed in their case.…”

“…Grassie and Elkins presented a model which predicted the corrugation growth observed in tracks with stiff fasteners [4]. The model deduced that this growth will not occur on tracks with more resilient fastening (less than about 30 MN/m).…”

Rail corrugation: advances in measurement, understanding and treatment

“…The search for a mechanism that would give a constant wavelength, which had been central to the joint British Rail Research and Cambridge University research project in the 1970s and 1980s, is evidently a chimera that had emerged because types of corrugation that arise from different mechanisms were then believed to have had the same cause. In an investigation of causes and treatments of corrugation encountered on metro railways in the USA, it was found that the principal wavelength-fixing mechanism for corrugation on these metro systems was the second torsional resonance of driven wheelsets, in which the main drive gear oscillates in anti-phase to the wheels [28]. There are good grounds to believe that this is indeed the principal wavelength-fixing mechanism for corrugation in general on metro railways (termed "rutting" in ref.…”

Rotational vibration absorber for the mitigation of rail rutting corrugation

“…This is sometimes the case for the second torsional resonance of subway wheel sets and a track with concrete sleepers. The coincidence of a peak in the vertical contact force and a torsional resonance is amplifying the phenomenon of rutting corrugation, but is not a necessary condition for its appearance (see [5,11]). It can appear as soon as the torsional vibrations are sustained by a variation of the vertical contact force.…”