Track geometry quality is an important aspect in railway engineering as it reflects the actual condition of a track giving account of track geometry deviations. Monitoring and prediction of a relevant geometry quality parameter over time provides opportunity for effective maintenance with advantage of extending the life of the asset, reducing maintenance cost and minimizing possession time requirements. Two important aspects of good maintenance practice relating to track geometry quality are quality assessment of every measurement run for special and common cause of variations and also understanding the progression of the deterioration process. This gives engineering insight into temporal failure phenomena including the behaviour of track structure over time that can facilitate condition forecasting and consequent maintenance planning. This paper presents an approach for assessing track geometry data and also compares three track quality prediction models- linear, exponential and suggested GM(1,1) models. A series of inspection data from a selected line section of Trafikverket (Swedish transport administration) is used in the study. The contribution of this paper is the improvement of prediction accuracy of track geometry model, which is an essential consideration in failure prediction technique.

Optimum allocation and efficient utilisation of track possession time are becoming important topics in railway infrastructure management due to increasing capacity demands. This development and other requirements of modern infrastructure management necessitate the improvement of planning and scheduling of large-scale maintenance activities such as tamping. It is therefore necessary to develop short-, medium- and long-term plans for performing tamping on a network or track section within a definite time horizon. To this end, two key aspects of infrastructure maintenance planning are considered in this paper, deterioration modelling and scheduling optimisation. An exponential deterioration function is applied to model the geometry quality of a series of 200 m segments of a 130 km line section, and an empirical model for recovery after tamping intervention is developed. These two models are subsequently used to generate a methodology to optimise a schedule for tamping intervention by minimising the total cost of intervention including the cost of track possession while geometry quality is ascertained to be within a desirable limit. The modelling considers two types of tamping interventions, preventive and corrective, with different intervention limits and tamping machines. The result of this paper suggests a tamping plan which will lead to optimum allocation of track possession time while maintaining the track geometry quality within specified limits.

In this paper, the problem of vibration transmission from slab track structures into bridge is studied by theoretical analysis. A vehicle–track–bridge coupling system dynamics model is established based on a multibody dynamics theory and a finite element method. The system model consists of vehicle model, track–bridge model and wheel/rail interaction model. The vehicle model is established based on the multibody dynamics theory, and the tack–bridge model is established by the finite element method. The vehicle model and track–bridge model are coupled through wheel/rail interaction model, and the track irregularities are included. The system dynamic responses are calculated, and the effectiveness of elastic materials in vibration reducing is discussed. The results demonstrate that elastic materials like slab mat layer inserted between slab track and bridge can reduce vibration transmitted from track into the bridge. Some suggestions for the design and application of slab mat are provided in the end of the paper.