Monitoring and Modeling Railway Structures on High-Speed Lines with Asphalt Concrete Underlay: A Study on the Bretagne–Pays de la Loire Line

Abstract

The design and durability of high-speed railway lines is a major challenge in the field of railway transportation. In France, 40 years of feedback on the field behavior of ballasted tracks led to improvements in the design rules. However, the settlement and wear of ballast, caused by dynamic stresses at high frequencies, remains a major problem on high-speed tracks leading to high maintenance costs. Studies have shown that this settlement is linked to the high acceleration produced in the ballast layer by high-speed trains traveling on the track, disrupting the granular assembly. The “Bretagne–Pays de la Loire” high-speed line (BPL HSL), with its varied subgrade conditions, represents the first large-scale application of asphalt concrete (GB) as the ballast sublayer. This line includes 77 km of conventional track with a granular sublayer of unbound granular material (UGM) and 105 km of track with an asphalt concrete sublayer under the ballast. During construction, instruments such as accelerometers, anchored deflection sensors, and strain gages, among others, were installed on four sections of the track. This paper examines the instrumentation as well as the acquisition system installed on the track. The data processing is explained first, followed by a presentation of the ViscoRail software, developed for modeling railway tracks. The bituminous section’s behavior and response is modeled using a multilayer dynamic response model, implemented in the ViscoRail software. A good match between experimental and calculated results is highlighted.