On the shoulders of CWR giants In 1994 UIC (the International Union of Railways) and ERRI (the European Railway Research Institute) set up a committee of specialists – D202 – to develop an international standard code for laying and maintenance of continuous welded rail track. Various research institutions and national railway administrations provided a complex…
The hunt for equilibrium The railway vehicle use wheelsets formed of a pair of steel wheels fixed rigidly on an axle. This setup makes the wheels move together on track. The system evolved in time to what we know today: tronconic wheel profiles with inside flanges, rail profiles and inclination, bogies, suspensions and so on.…
Things you find on Spark. In 1972, RTC conducted a series of tests to evaluate the effect on tamping on the track lateral resistance. Their results, published in 1973, have been referenced in numerous other research documents, including the ERRI D202 Reports – the committee that produced UIC Leaflet 720R “Laying and Maintenance of CWR…
Hallade was not alone. His method of track alignment rectification is by far the most used and known but there are quite few other methods for rectification and even proper realignment. One of these methods used a strange curve called involute (or evolvent). It was first described in this book from 1927. Die Absteckung von…
Motto: “I don’t see the code anymore. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead, negative, adverse.” Cypher Disclaimer: This is not a design guidance. Don’t believe everything you read online. LandXML? LandXML is a non-proprietary data standard on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, developed for engineering data exchange. A LandXML file can contain civil and survey…
It was very nice to find this in a standard. Snippet taken from here.
When I hear the name Bernoulli I think about some funny high school experiments of spraying coloured water on paper but also about an infinite loop curve the Roads Professor tormented us in Uni. I would have bet both things were discovered by the same Bernoulli. But no. The more known one, D. Bernoulli, the…
I mentioned in a previous article, The Cubic Parabola – a complicated simplification, that the curvature diagram of the Cubic Parabola increases linearly up to a peak point and then drops down. Only that first section of the parabolic curve can be used as an alignment transition. The curvature diagram of the Clothoid is however…
A railway track blog 