The consideration of crosswinds in railway design: Application to the Finnish railway network
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2023-05-15
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Master's Programme in Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering (SPT)
Language
en
Pages
73+6
Series
Abstract
To reach the transport climate goals, there is a need to reduce vehicle kilometres travelled and increase the use of sustainable mode of transportation. As far as long-distance transport is concerned, great growth potential has been identified in speeding up transport. In rail transport, in addition to speed, operational reliability and ensuring adherence to schedules are important issues. With climate change, extreme weather events are predicted to increase, which affects the safety of rail traffic, and there may be more wind-critical points along the tracks. This will affect the functionality and reliability of rail traffic in Finland. The influence of wind on rail traffic has not been studied much on the Finnish railway network. In the coming years, train speeds will increase, and locomotives will be made lighter. Previous international studies have found that increasing speeds and lightening the locomotive increase the risk of train overturning caused by crosswinds. International examples of wind caused accidents and risk mitigation methods can be found both in Europe and outside of it. In Europe, the effect of winds has been considered in the operation of rail traffic with separate speed limits and in the design phase of the track with structural design such as separate wind barriers. The aim of the thesis was to find out the effect of crosswinds on trains, to find conditions prone to derailment and mitigation measures for crosswinds. The study deals with international methods used to assess the effect of crosswind in rail transport. The European Union standard EN 14067-6:2018, which deals with crosswinds, divides the different requirements according to train speeds. This thesis deals with speeds between 140 km/h < V < 250 km/h, which are significant considering the near future of Finnish rail traffic. Thesis is limited to passenger trains and therefore does not take freight trains into account. In this research, qualitative interviews were conducted with experts and designers. Based on the interviews, a crosswind analysis procedure was carried out. The goal of the procedure is to help ensure the safety of rail traffic in the future, even after the increase in train and wind speeds. The results of the thesis are based on outcome of the case study about the functionality of the model. The thesis brings up factors predisposing a train to overturn due to crosswind, the observation of these on the Finnish railway network is tested with the model. In the future, the model can be used as a draft version for crosswind analysis. The study showed that more information should be gathered about the implementation of the crosswind analysis and the costs and functionality of the mitigation measures. For this, in the future the model and crosswind mitigation measures should be tested on a railway project.Description
Supervisor
Mladenović, MilošThesis advisor
Saarinen, PekkaLehtonen, Outi
Keywords
crosswind, climate change, railway design, high speed rail