A case study on the effect of speed variation on the growth of wear-type rail corrugation

The transportation noise phenomenon known as wear-type rail corrugation is a significant problem in railway engineering, which manifests as an undesirable periodic wear pattern on the contact surfaces of the rail. This variation from a flat profile induces unwanted vibrations, noise and other associated problems. Currently the only reliable solution to corrugation is removal by grinding at significant expense to the railway operator. Recent research by the current authors has theoretically shown that uniformity in pass speed enhances corrugation growth rate and that broadening the probabilistic pass speed distribution may be a possible method of mitigating corrugation growth. To further test these results and to quantify the expected performance, in this paper, field measured data from a site with recurrent corrugation is used to tune and validate a theoretical model that predicts the growth rate of the phenomenon. The effect of changing the field measured pass speed distribution is then investigated and results quantifying the expected reduction in corrugation growth rate are presented and discussed.