Monitoring-based performance assessment of rail-bridge interaction based on structural reliability

For today's railways, the continuous welded rail, which enhances driving dynamics and comfort for passengers, is often the construction method of choice. However, bridges and viaducts, which can be seen as singularities in the railway substructure, still pose a few unsolved problems; the bridge structure deforms under the impacts of thermal variation, creep, shrinkage, train passage and braking. The track-bridge interaction is an important parameter in railway bridge design. Measurement campaigns and research projects have been performed to investigate the interaction process and learn how to predict longitudinal forces in the rail and the concrete slab track. For the construction of long bridges on high-speed railway lines, new computational tools, monitoring systems and enhanced verification methods for tolerable rail stresses on bridges had to be developed. In order to take the modified stiffness conditions and recent findings on rail resistance into account, the verification schemes and safety concepts based on monitoring data have to be revised and performance-based methods need to be developed. The target of this article is to present monitoring- and reliability-based assessment methods for the concrete structure-rail interaction using monitoring and non-linear analysis techniques.