Keywords: railway bridges, data set, damping, measurements, reclassification, bridge dynamics.

In European high-speed rail transport, ensuring and verifying compatibility be-tween traffic volume and the existing rail infrastructure poses an increasing chal-lenge for infrastructure operators due to the steady rise in traffic volume. To pro-vide a realistic dynamic assessment of railway bridges, it is essential to identify the existing bridge characteristics accurately. In this context, the damping properties of the bridge used in calculations significantly influence the generated results. Euro-code EN 1991-2 classifies railway bridges into three categories in order to define span-dependent damping factors to be used in calculations. However, due to a lack of reliable damping factors for railway bridges, it follows a very conservative ap-proach, which is why damping factors identified from in-situ measurements are mostly far above the normative specifications. This contribution provides an over-view of the European bridge landscape in the high-speed rail network, using a data set of 379 bridges for which dynamic parameters derived from in-situ measure-ments are available. The data set offers insights into the composition of the Euro-pean bridge landscape. It demonstrates once again that actual damping properties significantly exceed the normative approaches, which highlights the potential for a redefinition. Finally, a possible recategorization of railway bridges is discussed, where the inclusion of several system parameters allows for the derivation of new approaches to defining damping factors as an alternative to the Eurocode. These novel approaches could make the existing potential of the bridge infrastructure available for realistic dynamic assessment of railway bridges through computation-al analysis.

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