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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 96
PROCEEDINGS OF THE THIRTEENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CIVIL, STRUCTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING COMPUTING
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping and Y. Tsompanakis
Paper 9

Noise from High Speed Trains: Harmonization of National and European Legislation

A. Bracciali1, P. Firpo2, S. Leth3, L. Michelet4 and M. Sacchi5

1Dipartimento di Meccanica e Tecnologie Industriali, Università di Firenze, Italy
2Bombardier Transportation, Vado Ligure, Italy
3Bombardier Transportation, Centre of Competence Acoustics, Västerås, Sweden
4Bombardier Transportation, Centre of Competence Acoustics, Hennigsdorf, Germany
5AnsaldoBreda, Pistoia, Italy

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
A. Bracciali, P. Firpo, S. Leth, L. Michelet, M. Sacchi, "Noise from High Speed Trains: Harmonization of National and European Legislation", in B.H.V. Topping, Y. Tsompanakis, (Editors), "Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Computing", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 9, 2011. doi:10.4203/ccp.96.9
Keywords: railway, noise, homologation, testing, directives, national legislation.

Summary
An intense and rigorous activity during the last decades led to the publication of the technical specifications for interoperability (TSI) that include both conventional rail (CR) and high speed rail (HS) in Europe. Concerning external train noise, the Association Européenne pour l'Interopérabilité Ferroviaire (AEIF) conducted, under a mandate of the European Commission, several external noise measuring campaigns during high speed train pass-by [1]. At the same time, standards were prepared to support the Directives on Interoperability, namely EN 15610 for rail roughness and EN 15461 for dynamic behaviour of the track related to noise generation.

Before all the aforementioned activities, a law was published in Italy in 1998 [2] concerning external noise limits from an environmental point of view and is still in force. Even stricter limits will come in force from 2012, fourteen years after publication.

In 2010 Trenitalia emitted a tender to purchase a fleet of new high speed trains. AnsaldoBreda and Bombardier won the tender and immediately started the design of the new V300Zefiro train also from the acoustic point of view. Newly improved acoustic designs will be introduced in comparison with the last 300 km/h trains that entered into service in Italy in 1992.

As the scope of the TSIs and the Italian law is slightly different, an approach that could reconcile the different requirements of national law and European Directives was necessary to remove the inevitably arising clashes.

This paper describes the latest developments of the European legislation [3,4,5] in the field of railway noise and the approach followed by the manufacturer with the scientific support of a second party (University of Florence), to ensure the application of the principles of the Directives, i.e. the free circulation of people and goods throughout Europe for technically interoperable rolling stock, including the relationships with the safety boards in charge of the technical admission for the service of the new rolling stock.

References
1
NOEMIE Project (20021EU11663), Synthesis Report, AEIF, July 2005.
2
Decreto del Presidente della Repubblica sul Rumore Ferroviario, DPR 459/1998
3
A. Frid, S. Leth, "Track quality extrapolation for railway vehicle pass-by noise", Proceedings of ICSV 16, Krakow, Poland, 2009
4
F. Letourneaux, N. Meunier, P. Fodiman, "Small deviations procedure: a new way to introduce flexibility in the conformity assessment of reference tracks for pass-by acoustic tests", Proceedings of IWRN 10, Nagahama, Japan, 2010. doi:10.1007/978-4-431-53927-8_62
5
F. Letourneaux, N. Meunier, P. Fodiman, "From the limited to a full revision of the Noise TSI - Presentation of simplified evaluating methods for the verification of conformity", Proceedings of WCRR, Lille, France, 2011.

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