The corrugation of railway rails: 2. Monitoring and conclusions

Abstract

Monitoring of test sites has been undertaken on a new metro system for 2 years after the start of service traffic to examine whether rail corrugation would occur. The track specification required that all known corrugation formation mechanisms be considered, and mitigation measures taken for design of the trackwork. The metro includes demanding conditions for corrugation formation. Monitoring was undertaken twice annually for the first 2 years of operation at nine test sites. After this time, irregularities at all sites and in all wavelength ranges were within the limits for Class 1 reprofiling in the 2006 version of the European Standard for reprofiling, in which limits on irregularities are similar to those of the acoustic standard EN ISO3095:2005. A method of undertaking a corrugation survey is presented from which it was deduced that at most 2.5% of the overall length of the railway was corrugated to an extent that could be detected by this means.