Effectiveness of a raised road: rail crossing for the safety of road vehicle occupants

Abstract

A raised crossing (RC), as an alternate to the current form of level crossings to minimise risks of wheel-rail contact failure under frontal collision of trains onto stuck trucks, has been recently formulated by the authors (Engineering Failure Analysis, 80 (2017) 403–415) to mitigate the severity of accidents at road-rail crossings. The aim of the present paper is to assess the effectiveness of the profile of the RC to minimise the risk of speeding through and minimise the peak vertical acceleration of the passing road vehicle below the threshold level for discomfort and safety of its occupants. For this purpose, a simplified two-dimensional multibody dynamic simulation modelling method has been formulated and validated using a detailed three-dimensional industry standard model. The validated model has then been used to optimise the geometric profile of the RC by minimising the peak vertical accelerations of the occupants below the safety threshold of 0.7 g. It is shown that the optimised profile of the RC increases the peak acceleration with the increase in speed of travel of the road vehicles whilst the LC does the opposite. This finding confirms that the RC has the potential to reduce the risk of speeding, which is vital to the safety of the train and road vehicles at rail – road crossings.