Abstract—The railway track elements (iron rail bars, concrete sleepers, crushed stone layers, base or ballast layer and the subgrade layer) play an important role to resist the stresses resulting from the movement of trains on this track line, the basic purpose for the railway components to transfer resulting stresses safely to earth¡¯s natural layer. In this paper we use the Track 3.1 program developed by US army crops engineers to calculate the rail bending stresses and tie bending stresses as well as shear stresses or layers reaction of load hanging from the train and on the assumption that the material of installation layer (ballast) behavior as in elastic materials. Several attempts to study the effect of changing the thickness of the installation layer (ballast), the distance between the sleepers (tie spacing), sectional area of the installation panel and modulus of elasticity calculated from the value of CBR test (California bearing ratio) as well as the number of bolts( spike number) , on the rail bending stresses , tie bending stresses and the vertical stresses at the surface of installation layer (ballast) , and subgrade layer as well as reaction (shear) for the sleepers. From the results obtained we note that the rail bending stresses is less when increasing the thickness of the installation layer (ballast) ,when increase ballast grade size ( aggregate gradation ) and increase the modulus of elasticity of the subgrade layer. While the tie bending stresses increases with increasing distance (tie spacing) between them and the number of screws which fasten it with the installation layer, and less with increase the modulus of elasticity of the subgrade layer and the sectional area of the panel installation.

Index Terms—Railway track element, Track 3.1 program, Rail bending stress, Tie bending stress

Cite: Abdulhaq Hadi Abed Ali, Atheer Naji Hameed, and Sinan Khaleel Ibrahim, "Effect of Railway Track Elements Properties on Stresses Distribution," International Journal of Structural and Civil Engineering Research, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 116-128, May 2013.