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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 104
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RAILWAY TECHNOLOGY: RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND MAINTENANCE
Edited by: J. Pombo
Paper 169

Reducing Life Cycle Costs through analysis of the Interface Between Vehicle and Railway Track in the Netherlands

A. Zoeteman and R.P.B.J. Dollevoet

Railway Engineering, Delft Univeristy of Technology and ProRail, the Netherlands

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
A. Zoeteman, R.P.B.J. Dollevoet, "Reducing Life Cycle Costs through analysis of the Interface Between Vehicle and Railway Track in the Netherlands", in J. Pombo, (Editor), "Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Railway Technology: Research, Development and Maintenance", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 169, 2014. doi:10.4203/ccp.104.169
Keywords: rolling contact fatigue, wheel-rail interface, yaw stiffness, wheel quality, track access charge.

Summary
This paper will show ways to improve the cost effectiveness and other aspects of railway performance, by analysing interface parameters between rolling stock and infrastructure. In railway systems, the technical functions and parameters of rolling stock and infrastructure are highly interacting. Developments in the Netherlands showed that optimisation between vehicle and infrastructure design and maintenance need much attention, which risks being neglected in a separated railway setting. The research initiated identifies parameters that are important for all railways, and highlights projects and actual improvements, achieved or planned, in the vehicle/infrastructure interface on the Dutch railway network. The paper describes the selection of parameters that show a potential business case or results in cost effectiveness. For these parameters, the solutions undertaken or being implemented are described. It can be demonstrated in the data from ProRail that the process resulted (in the last 10 years) in a reduction of life cycle costs, due to rolling contact fatigue, of around 50 million euros. Most improvements resulted from infrastructure-sided measures but also, more recently, from measures at the vehicle side of the interface.

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