Fatigue problems in land transport are characterized by very large numbers of stress cycles arising from the motion of the vehicle along a track or road. The paper concentrates on two examples drawn from railway engineering and examines the contribution which improved knowledge of crack propagation could make to design methods and to safety. In the first example the potential advantages of a crack -propagation model for fatigue of welds under variable-amplitude loading are discussed; in the second the importance of crack-propagation information to safety standards for axles is explained. In both cases it is concluded that current inability to deal with small cracks is a major handicap.
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