Derailment of trains moving on lead rubber bearing bridges under seismic loads

Abstract

This study investigates the derailment of trains moving on bridges with lead rubber bearings. A moving wheel/rail axis element that couples two wheels and rails together is first developed to generate a train finite element model with 12 cars, while the sliding, sticking, and separation modes of the wheels and rails are accurately simulated. The finite element results indicate that the base shear of the bridge with lead rubber bearings is much smaller than that without lead rubber bearings. Similar to the base shear, the train derailment coefficients for the bridge with lead rubber bearings are much smaller than those without lead rubber bearings because yield lead rubber bearings during large seismic loads can change the bridge natural frequency to avoid resonance. For earthquakes with a very long dominant period, the lead rubber bearing effect to reduce the train derailment may not be obvious because the natural period of the bridge due to the full yield of lead rubber bearings can approach the dominant period of the earthquake.