Abstract:
Railway infrastructure is essential for transportation worldwide, and ensuring its safe and efficient
operation is of utmost importance. The ballasted track system is still the most common railway
infrastructure type, but the ballast layer can deform and degrade over time, leading to various types of
track irregularities and defects. This paper addresses two topics simultaneously that are both known to
potentially increase the track geometry degradation: the train speed and railway transitions. The study is
performed with an innovative three-dimensional numerical implementation developed to calculate the
track's settlement caused by the repeated passage of railway vehicles, and explicitly considering the
dynamic interaction between the vehicle and the track, and the evolution of the track's deformation over
time. The presented results not only clearly demonstrate that the train speed can significantly affect the
track geometry evolution at railway transitions, amplifying its degradation, but also that the long-term
response at the entrance segment is quite different than the response at the exit segment of the railway
transition. The results of this study can help develop more efficient measures to mitigate the harmful
effects associated with the amplification of the track's response, improving the railway infrastructure's
safety and efficiency.