The railway noise reductions achieved in the Silence project

Abstract

The European project Silence is dedicated to the reduction of railway and roadway noise in urban areas. Within the framework of the subproject E and G, the reduction of the railway noise is addressed. Source ranking of state of the art rolling stocks has been carried out. Then, the Diesel engine, the exhaust, the cooling unit, the electrical engine, the wheels and the track have been optimised by the manufacturers and prototypes have been constructed. The most promising have been selected through laboratory measurement to be installed on the trains and trams. Last measurement campaigns have been carried out to characterise the combination of optimised rolling stocks running on optimised track. Then, relevant reductions of the pass-by noise have been achieved for electrical and Diesel multiple unit trains, freight trains and trams. In the same time, a software called VAMPPASS has been developed in subproject B to simulate the time signal of a train pass-by. The paper focuses on the results of the last measurement campaigns which validate the noise reduction achieved on the global pass-by noise of several rolling stocks and tracks. A comparison with the reduction predicted by VAMPPASS will be also presented. Some improvement of the solutions will be also addressed.