Experimental Research of Frictional Sleeper’s Effect on the Lateral Resistance of Railway Tracks

In conventional railways, especially in mountainous areas, there are a lot of curves with small radius (around 220-250). In these kinds of tracks, providing the lateral resistance of tracks is so difficult. Therefore, rail joints are not welded together. Thus, leaving the rail joints in tracks increase the maintenance cost, repair work, possession time and, finally, decrease the capacity of railway line. Up to now, different methods have been suggested for increasing the lateral resistance of tracks. In this paper, new frictional sleepers are designed with cross-wise ridges at the underside in order to utilize more internal frictions, potential of the crushed stone ballast, by forming a coarse toothing with adequate dimensions.
An experiment has been done on a track with and without frictional sleepers in SRE LAB-IUST. It was found that the lateral resistance of the railway track increases %59.1 by using frictional sleepers. According to test results, rail joints in curves with the radius less than 400 m can be welded by employing frictional sleepers.