Some developments in community response research since the second international workshop on railway and tracked transit system noise in 1978

As far as human responses to railway noise are concerned, knowledge has increased considerably since the Second International Workshop on Railway and Tracked Transit System Noise was held in Lyon, France, in October 1978. Only some developments are mentioned in this article. Concerning land use planning some evidence became available that in maintaining or recovering a certain amount of well-being the concept of noise zoning deserves most attention, and that applying heavier sound insulation measures is not sufficient in solving the problem of noise annoyance. About the influence of background noise on annoyance, data from railway noise surveys are not conclusive. Whether or not habituation to noise occurs seems to be dependent on the way it has been made operational. Neither the often used self-reported habituation nor length of residence appears to have a clear relation with annoyance. Noise from shunting yards appears to be very annoying, compared with noise from through trains, road traffic and aircraft. The characteristics of the noise causing this relatively high degree of annoyance are still subject to study. “Normal” through trains cause less annoyance than road traffic and aircraft, the noise levels being equal. Some specific disturbances, however, like for instance being disturbed while watching television or having a conversation, occur at lower noise levels with railway noise than with road traffic noise.     

Dynamic response of underpasses for high-speed train lines

Underpasses are common in modern railway lines. Wildlife corridors and drainage conduits often fall into this category of partially buried structures. Their dynamic behavior has received far less attention than that of other structures such as bridges, but their large number makes their study an interesting challenge from the viewpoint of safety and cost savings. Here, we present a complete study of a culvert, including on-site measurements and numerical modeling.The studied structure belongs to the high-speed railway line linking Segovia and Valladolid in Spain. The line was opened to traffic in 2004. On-site measurements were performed for the structure by recording the dynamic response at selected points of the structure during the passage of high-speed trains at speeds ranging between 200 and 300 km/h.The measurements provide not only reference values suitable for model fitting, but also a good insight into the main features of the dynamic behavior of this structure. Finite element techniques were used to model the dynamic behavior of the structure and its key features. Special attention is paid to vertical accelerations, the values of which should be limited to avoid track instability according to Eurocode. This study furthers our understanding of the dynamic response of railway underpasses to train loads.     

Prediction of vibrations induced by underground railway traffic in Beijing

This paper examines the problem of subway induced vibrations on line 4 of Beijing metro, which is currently under construction and is planned to pass in close proximity of the Physics Laboratory of Beijing University. The laboratory has a lot of equipment that is very sensitive to traffic induced vibrations and future operation of metro line 4 is a matter of concern. Hence, it is important to study the influence of subway induced vibrations inside the laboratory and to propose a viable solution to mitigate the vibrations. In this paper, the tunnel north of Chengfulu station is modelled using a coupled periodic FE-BE model and the free-field response due to moving trains is predicted. In addition, vibration measurements have been performed on the site of the Physics Laboratory to estimate the existing vibration levels due to road traffic. The predicted and measured vibrations are superimposed to assess the vibrations due to the combined effect of road and railway traffic in the vicinity of the Physics Laboratory. Apart from the numerical investigations, vibration measurements have also been performed on a similar site at line 1 of Beijing metro to substantiate the estimated results on metro line 4. Finally, it is studied how the vibrations can be controlled using a floating slab track, which is widely used as an effective measure of vibration isolation in tunnels. The efficiency of a 7.9 Hz floating slab track as a vibration countermeasure is assessed in this paper. This study demonstrates the applicability of the numerical model for the relevant assessment of subway induced vibrations and its use to study the performance of different track structures in the tunnel.     

Station Model for Rail Transit System Using Cellular Automata

In this paper, we propose a new cellular automata model to simulate the railway traffic at station. Based on NaSch model, the proposed station model is composed of the main track and the siding track. Two different schemes for trains passing through station are considered. One is the scheme of ＂pass by the main track, start and stop by the siding track＂. The other is the scheme of ＂two tracks play the same role＂. We simulate the train movement using the proposed model and analyze the traffic flow at station. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed cellular automata model can be successfully used for the simulations of railway traffic. Some characteristic behaviors of railway traffic flow can be reproduced. Moreover, the simulation values of the minimum headway are close to the theoretical values. This result demonstrates the dependability and availability of the proposed model.     

A Study of the Suitable Measurement Location and Metrics for Assessing the Vibration Source Strength Based on the Field-Testing Data of Nanchang Underground Railway

Underground railway vibration source strength is one of the key values used for environmental impact assessment and the evaluation of mitigation measure’s performance. However, currently there is no international standard of measuring the underground railway vibration source strength for such purposes. The available local standards and industrial guidelines do not agree on measurement locations as well as the metrics for presenting the source strength. This has caused many confusions. This paper aims to study the suitable measurement location and metrics using the data from a large scale field-testing carried out at the Nanchang underground railway (Metro Line 1, China) in 2017. 200 passing trains were recorded during the test at two different sections of the railway line, one with the spring floating slab installed and the other without. Three locations were chosen at each section, including one in the middle of the track and two on the tunnel wall at different heights. Based on the results of statistical analysis, the maximum of z-weighted vertical vibration level (VLzmax) obtained at a lower measurement location on the tunnel wall is the best for representing the underground railway vibration source strength, which is 76.66 dB obtained from this study.     

INSTABILITY OF VIBRATION OF A MOVING-TRAIN-AND-RAIL COUPLING SYSTEM

This paper presents the derivation of the governing equations for the stability of vibration of an integrated system comprising a moving train and the railway track. The train consists of a convoy of articulated two-axle wagons. The equations are applicable to any arbitrary number of axles at arbitrary spacing. Each axle is modelled as a mass-spring-damper vibration unit. The railway track is an infinitely long Euler beam subjected to an axial compressive force and rests on a visco-elastic foundation. The governing equations for the integrated system are coupled differential equations, which can be transformed to algebraic equations by Fourier and Laplace transforms. Subsequent inverse Fourier transform and contour integration yield the instability equation. Critical parameter is identified. It follows by parametric studies on the instability of vibration due to different train configurations. Illustrative examples for trains having up to 20 wagons or 40 axles are given.     

A railway track dynamics model based on modal substructuring and a cyclic boundary condition

This article presents a technique for modelling the coupled dynamics of a railway vehicle and the track. The method is especially useful for simulating the dynamics of high speed trains running on nonlinear tracks. The main hypothesis is a cyclic system: an infinite track on which there is an infinite set of identical vehicles spaced at a regular interval of distance. Thus the main problems of the finite-length track models (e.g. the waves that reflect at the end of the track and interact with the vehicle; and the time interval of integration must be shorter than the track length divided by the velocity) are avoided. The flexibility of the method can be observed from the case studies presented in the present work: a vehicle passing over a hanging sleeper, and the vehicle-track dynamics for different ballast compaction cases. The results show the influence of the hanging sleeper gap on the wheel-rail contact forces, and the bending moment at the sleeper for different ballast compaction cases.     

On the dynamics of interaction between a moving mass and an infinite one-dimensional elastic structure at the stability limit

The paper herein deals with the study of the dynamic behaviour generated by the instability of the vibration of a loaded mass, uniformly moving along an Euler-Bernoulli beam on a viscoelastic foundation, induced by the anomalous Doppler waves excited in the beam. This issue is relevant for the case of modern trains travelling along a track with soft soil when the trains speed exceeds the phase velocity of the waves induced in the track. The model corresponds to a railway vehicle reduced to a loaded wheel running along a (half) track. The beam takes account of the bending stiffness of the rail and the mass of the track, including the mass of the rail, semi-sleepers and half of the ballast layer, where the viscoelastic foundation represents the subgrade. The model includes the wheel/rail Hertzian contact and it allows the simulation of the possibility of contact loss. The nonlinear equations of motion are integrated using a numerical approach based on the Green’s function method. When the vibration becomes unstable, the system evolution is a limit cycle characterised by a succession of shocks, due to the action of two opposite factors: the anomalous Doppler waves that pump energy at the interface between the moving mass and the beam, thus forcing the mass to take off, and the static load that push the mass downwards. The frequency of the shocks increases at higher velocity and the magnitude of the impact force decreases; the most dangerous velocity is the critical one, which represents the stability limit of the linear approximation of the motion equations. The transient behaviour that precedes the limit cycle appearance is being analysed. The Hertzian contact influences the time history of the limit cycle and the magnitude of the impact force and, therefore, it is essential to be included in the model. To the authors’ knowledge, this problem has never been dealt with.     

Discrete-time movement model of a group of trains on a rail line with stochastic disturbance

This paper presents a discrete-time model to describe the movements of a group of trains, in which some operational strategies, including traction operation, braking operation and impact of stochastic disturbance, are defined. To show the dynamic characteristics of train traffic flow with stochastic disturbance, some numerical experiments on a railway line are simulated. The computational results show that the discrete-time movement model can well describe the movements of trains on a rail line with the moving-block signalling system. Comparing with the results of no disturbance, it finds that the traffic capacity of the rail line will decrease with the influence of stochastic disturbance. Additionally, the delays incurred by stochastic disturbance can be propagated to the subsequent trains, and then prolong their traversing time on the rail line. It can provide auxiliary information for rescheduling trains when the stochastic disturbance occurs on the railway.     

Structural damage identification for railway bridges based on train-induced bridge responses and sensitivity analysis

A damage identification approach using train-induced responses and sensitivity analysis is proposed for the nondestructive evaluation of railway bridges. The dynamic responses of railway bridges under moving trains composed of multiple vehicles are calculated by a train-bridge dynamic interaction analysis. Using the stiffness variation of the bridge element as an index for damage identification, the sensitivities of train-induced bridge responses to structural damage are analyzed and the sensitivity matrices are formed. By comparing the theoretical measurement responses of one measurement point in two different states, the damage indices of all elements are updated iteratively, and finally the absolute or relative damage is located and quantified. A three-span continuous bridge numerical example proves that the proposed dynamic response sensitivity-based FE model updating damage identification method is not only effective to detect local damage of railway bridges, but also insensitive to the track irregularity and the measurement noise.     

A Study on Railway Surface Defects Detection Based on Machine Vision

The detection of rail surface defects is an important tool to ensure the safe operation of rail transit. Due to the complex diversity of track surface defect features and the small size of the defect area, it is difficult to obtain satisfying detection results by traditional machine vision methods. The existing deep learning-based methods have the problems of large model sizes, excessive parameters, low accuracy and slow speed. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method based on an improved YOLOv4 (You Only Look Once, YOLO) for railway surface defect detection. In this method, MobileNetv3 is used as the backbone network of YOLOv4 to extract image features, and at the same time, deep separable convolution is applied on the PANet layer in YOLOv4, which realizes the lightweight network and real-time detection of the railway surface. The test results show that, compared with YOLOv4, the study can reduce the amount of the parameters by 78.04%, speed up the detection by 10.36 frames per second and decrease the model volume by 78%. Compared with other methods, the proposed method can achieve a higher detection accuracy, making it suitable for the fast and accurate detection of railway surface defects.     

Sensitivity analysis applied to a dynamic railroad model

An analytical method of analyzing sensitivity is presented. It is shown that in a special case, when the dynamical problem is described by differential equations (of any order) with constant coefficients, first and second order semilogarithmic (semirelative) sensitivity functions can be determined analytically. The method is applied to the practical problem of railway track vibration, with the intention of using it for the identification of railway track model parameters in the future. The railway track model is an infinite beam resting on multi-parameter viscoelastic subsoil.     

准移动闭塞系统的元胞自动机模型及列车延迟传播规律的研究

在NaSch模型的基础上，针对铁路交通的特点提出一种用于模拟准移动闭塞系统的元胞自动机模型.应用该模型模拟了准移动闭塞系统列车延迟传播的交通现象，分析了准移动闭塞系统中的轨道定位单元长度、发车时间间隔、初始延迟时间等因素对列车延迟传播的影响. 关键词： 元胞自动机 交通流 准移动闭塞     

A Control Simulation Method of High-Speed Trains on Railway Network with Irregular Influence

Based on the discrete time method, an effective movement control model is designed for a group of high-speed trains on a rail network. The purpose of the model is to investigate the specific traffic characteristics of high-speed trains under the interruption of stochastic irregular events. In the model, the high-speed rail traffic system is supposed to be equipped with the moving-block signalling system to guarantee maximum traversing capacity of the railway. To keep the safety of trains' movements, some operational strategies are proposed to control the movements of trains in the model, including traction operation, braking operation, and entering-station operation. The numerical simulations show that the designed model can well describe the
movements of high-speed trains on the rail network. The research results can provide the useful information not only for investigating the propagation features of relevant delays under the irregular disturbance but also for rerouting and rescheduling trains on the rail network.     

Scheduling trains on railway network using random walk method

According to random walk, in this paper, we propose a new traffic model for scheduling trains on a railway network. In the proposed method, using some iteration rules for walkers, the departure and the arrival times of trains at each station are determined. We test the proposed method on an assumed railway network. The numerical simulations and the analytical results demonstrate that the proposed method provides an effective tool for scheduling trains. Some characteristic behaviours of train movement can be reproduced, such as train delay.     

A method of assessing the noise nuisance arising from the channel tunnel high speed rail system

Until recently railway noise has been accepted as a well established but dwindling source of noise nuisance, and has been subject to relatively little sociological study. The proposal for high speed trains through previously quiet areas has however called for the establishment of subjective noise zones. The paper puts forward such zones, based upon sociological data in other countries and on aircraft, road traffic and community data in the United Kingdom. Planning zones are calculated for the expected frequencies of rail services, and based upon the estimated and measured noise levels of high speed trains. Some comments are made upon the generalization of this information, and on the effects of barriers, cuttings and distance; and on vibration and shock effects near to the railway line itself.     

An Improved Walk Model for Train Movement on Railway Network

In this paper, we propose an improved walk model for simulating the train movement on railway network. In the proposed method, walkers represent trains. The improved walk model is a kind of the network-based simulation analysis model. Using some management rules for walker movement, walker can dynamically determine its departure and arrival times at stations. In order to test the proposed method, we simulate the train movement on a part of railway network. The numerical simulation and analytical results demonstrate that the improved model is an effective tool for simulating the train movement on railway network. Moreover, it can well capture the characteristic behaviors of train scheduling in railway traffic.     

固定闭塞系统下列车运行限速区段交通流特性分析

针对铁路交通中四显示固定自动闭塞系统下的限速区段，建立了元胞自动机模型，对限速区段的交通流进行了模拟，分析了限速区段长度、发车时间间隔和限速值对交通流的影响，模拟结果表明减少限速区段长度、适当增加发车时间间隔和提高限速区段限速值都可增加列车在绿灯下的运行时间. 关键词： 四显示固定自动闭塞 元胞自动机 交通流     

The effect of critically moving loads on the vibrations of soft soils and isolated railway tracks

The dynamic response of the railway track is strongly influenced by the underlying soil. For a soft soil and very high train speeds or for a very soft soil and regular train speeds, the train speed can be close to the speed of elastic waves in the soil. This paper presents a detailed study of the so-called “moving-load effect”, i.e. an amplification of the dynamic response due to the load movement, for the tracks on soft soil. The analysis is carried out by evaluating the related integrals in the wavenumber domain. The influence of the load speed is quantified for a large set of parameters, showing that the effect on the soil vibration is reduced with increase of the frequency, track width and inverse wave velocity. Therefore, the moving-load effect associated with vibratory train loads is negligible whereas the amplification associated with the moving dead weight of the train can be significant. The strong moving-load effect on a perfectly homogeneous soil, however, can be strongly diminished by a layered or randomly varying soil situation. This theoretical result is affirmed by measurements at a test site in Germany where the trains run on a very soft soil at a near-critical speed. The results for soft soils are compared with experimental and theoretical results for a stiff soil. It is found that the influence of the stiffness of the soil is much stronger than the moving-load effect. This holds for the soil vibration as well as for the track vibration which both show a minor dependence on the load speed but a considerable dependence on the soil stiffness in theory and experiment.Railway tracks can include soft isolation elements such as rail pads, sleeper shoes and ballast mats. For these types of isolation elements and normal soil conditions, the influence of the load speed is usually negligible. There is only one isolation measure for which the moving load may be effective: a track which is constructed as a heavy mass-spring system. The resonance of this track system is shifted to lower frequencies and amplitudes for increasing train speed. A critical train speed can be reached if the mass-spring system has a marginal bending stiffness along the track.     

A Complex Network Model for Analyzing Railway Accidents Based on the Maximal Information Coefficient

It is an important issue to identify important influencing factors in railway accident analysis. In this paper, employing the good measure of dependence for two-variable relationships, the maximal information coefficient (MIC), which can capture a wide range of associations, a complex network model for railway accident analysis is designed in which nodes denote factors of railway accidents and edges are generated between two factors of which MIC values are larger than or equal to the dependent criterion. The variety of network structure is studied. As the increasing of the dependent criterion, the network becomes to an approximate scale-free network. Moreover, employing the proposed network, important influencing factors are identified. And we find that the annual track density-gross tonnage factor is an important factor which is a cut vertex when the dependent criterion is equal to 0.3. From the network, it is found that the railway development is unbalanced for different states which is consistent with the fact.