Study of ballast layer stiffness in railway tracks

Abstract

In this paper, ballast layer stiffness in railway tracks is investigated. Test results show that the percentage of ballast contamination changes considerably across the ballast layer depth. For this reason, the ballast was divided during modelling into three layers and the stiffness of each layer was derived based on the pyramid model developed for that purpose. The results show that the stiffness exhibited by the bottom ballast layer exceeds by up to 20 % that of the top and middle layers.