Transferability of Railway Vibration Emission from One Site to Another

This paper suggests a new method for characterizing and predicting railway vibration emission, which ensures transferability from one site to another. The method is based on a source-receiver mobility approach, where the vehicle-track system (including ballast) is the source, the ground the receiver and the contact forces between them represented by a line of uncorrelated forces. The method is numerically validated using a home-developed railway source model. It is shown that a railway source can be a “force” source, a “velocity” source or neither, depending on frequency and the mobility conditions with ground. The contact force can be estimated in any situation from the so-called blocked force, knowing the (complex) mobilities of the railway source and the ground. The blocked force can be measured in situ using a procedure similar to the US DOT FRA procedure. Procedures for measuring the ground mobility exist. Finding field measurement configurations and procedures to get the railway source mobility is the main future challenge to demonstrate the practicality of this novel idea.