A contribution to planning more economical maintenances on the railway track

Abstract

The maintenance of railway track is essential to control the physical and geometric degradation of its components and thus enable an efficient and safe traffic. The services' execution costs, however, are significantly high, demanding strategies technically and economically efficients. In this paper, a new concept that relates the track geometric state and the rate of the components' degradation was studied in order to verify its technical feasibility and potential for cost reduction. Therefore, a bibliographic survey was carried out that investigated and corroborated the hypothesis that the track's geometric condition is capable of inducing dynamic forces in vehicles whose magnitude can reach considerable levels and, based on this theoretical framework, was developed an empirical study from a national railway data, through which it was analyzed how this characteristic can influence the useful life of the track's components, and also how it can be used in planning more efficient and sustainable long-term maintenance strategies. The results obtained were significantly relevant, with significant potential savings, mainly due to a considerable increase in the components' useful life, which therefore indicated how promising is the development of this new field of study both in its economic aspect and in environmental sustainability achieved by the maximized use of the components. Aiming to promote the improvement of the theme, at the end of this article, opportunities for future research are presented.