Integrated Computational Materials, Process and Product Engineering – IC-MPPE 2022

Currently railway turnouts have a significant higher demand for maintenance compared to standard / tangent track. The root cause behind this increased maintencance demand is based on the effect of higher forces in the wheel/ rail contact due to transition zones, e.g. in the crossing panel or in the switch panel.
In the European project Shift2Rail, voestalpine first analysed together with its industrial partners ÖBB Infrastruktur, Kirchdorfer Concrete Solutions and Getzner Werkstoffe the periodic maintenance tasks and the costs behind. The result of this analysis showed that highest maintenance costs occur for the exchange of crossings or half set of switches but also for ballast tamping and ballast cleaning to provide a good track geometry.
In the following, with the overall aim to reduce in the future the maintenance demand in turnouts, an upated turnout design was developed and out of this development finally two demonstrator turnouts were manufactured and installed in 2020 in Vienna. These demonstrator turnouts have numerous innovative features included:

1. High wear and RCF resistant rail grade 400 UHC and special switch rail machining TOZ+ to extend the lifetime of the half set of switches.
2. Elastic support below the crossing to reduce peak forces during the wheel transition process to extend the lifetime of the crossing
3. Introduction of an elastic fastening system for optimized stiffness distribution through the whole turnout and a new sleeper design including sleeper coupling systems and under sleeper pads to optimise the ballast load and furthermore the settlement of the turnout.

Finally, to prove the effectivness of the optimised design a large measurement campaign including permanent measurement systems was setup.