Overall railway noise impact in the U.K.

Abstract

As part of a British Rail (BR) “Environmental and Social Impact” study in 1975, an attempt at assessing the relative noise impact of rail and road transport was made; 24 hour L eq in dB(A) units was adopted for the noise measure, as this appeared to give good correlation with “dissatisfaction” and permitted simple estimation of levels from traffic and location data. Five train types were defined, two classes of line, three regions of population density and three standard topographies. The base L eq value for each traffic mix, line and population region could be established from BR survey data, and the propagation from topography and population (house) densities, to give the population subjected to each L eq . The percentage “dissatisfied” at each L eq was then applied to arrive at the total population “dissatisfied”, which was found to be 106 000. A similar approach applied to motorways and principal “A” roads gave 4480 000 “dissatisfied”.