A New Bituminous Ballast-Less and Sleeper-Less Thin Railway Track Structure

Abstract

This paper presents a new structure design for a ballast-less and sleeper-less bituminous railway track. The structure is thinner than the conventional French tracks made with granular materials. This makes it especially suited for track renovation works in tunnels and other infrastructure configurations where the respect of the accurate and durable railway track geometry is essential. The proposed structure is a system associating a high-performance bituminous mixture, called GB5®, and the edilon)(sedra Embedded Rail System (ERS) using the Corkelast® resin as rail fastening system. This paper presents details of the components of the proposed structure and of its construction methodology. The system was submitted to mechanical tests to assess its aptitude to serve as rail fastening system in Europe, according to EN 13481 part 5 and EN 13146 part 9 test methods for non-ballasted rail fastening systems. The sample manufacturing and test protocols are described in this paper. The results from two tests are presented and analyzed. The system was found to be resilient and to meet the requirements of the European standard. Further analysis and large scale tests will give more insight into the behavior of the system, especially in terms of permanent deformation of the bituminous mixture and of the supporting soil.