A passive road-rail crossing design to minimise wheel-rail contact failure risk under frontal collision of trains onto stuck trucks

Abstract

Derailments of trains often occur due to the wheel-rail contact failure caused by the impact of the trains with road vehicles at road-rail crossings. Frontal collisions of passenger trains onto stuck road vehicles occur frequently at such road-rail crossings even where active warning systems are installed. Such collisions are often fatal and cause significant damages to vehicles and the infrastructure especially when they incur derailments. Innovations in passive railway infrastructure designs for mitigating the severity of collision induced derailments are rare. This paper presents a formulation for a passive road-rail crossing involving stiffened edges of the raised road pavement to minimise the risk of failure of wheel–rail contact using a nonlinear three-dimensional multibody dynamics model. Severe derailment scenarios of trains passing through the passive and normal road-rail crossings have been analysed and presented. The innovative design of the road-rail crossing with passive track structure presented in the paper is shown to reduce the failure of the wheel-rail contact and hence the train-truck frontal collision derailment potential.