EFFICIENT STABILITY ASSESSMENT OF EMBANKMENTS ALONG A MAJOR RAILWAY CORRIDOR

To further increase the appeal of rail travel in Switzerland, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) aims to reduce journey times on various routes. One of the strategies pursued was the ongoing use of the existing infrastructure in combination with a driving technology that enables simultaneously faster and lighter trains leading to smaller vertical loads but higher horizontal forces. This implied that the infrastructure and in particular the embankments had to be verified for the new load configurations. In this context, a comprehensive dataset covering the embankment geometry as well as information on the speed profile of the trains of an over 80 km-long railway corridor was analysed to assess the structural integrity of embankments for the revised load scenarios.

This report presents the methodology pursued to estimate the overall rehabilitation costs of the railway line for the new load configuration. This methodology includes efficient processing of the railway dataset by integrating a combination of partially automated tasks, back-calculation of subsoil parameters and targeted quality assessments.