A reliability assessment of railway track buckling during an extreme heatwave

Abstract

This paper presents a reliability assessment of railway track buckling during extreme heatwave events. Monte Carlo simulation is used to estimate the probability of track buckling. The effects of important predictor parameters such as the effective buckling length and buckling modes of the rails, as well as the rail temperatures at the time of their installation and during the heatwave are taken into account in the simulation. The results show that the probability of the buckling of tracks during an extreme heatwave similar to the event that took place in Melbourne in January 2009 is about 2/100,000 on average, which is a good estimate of the number of the track segments that were actually observed to have buckled in the Melbourne railway network. This assessment demonstrates a science-based approach to reliability assessment for track buckling during heatwaves.

Keywords

Reliability railway track buckling climate change heatwave Monte Carlo simulation

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