Method for running safety assessment of railway vehicles against structural vibration displacement during earthquakes

Abstract

The adverse effects of earthquake-related structural vibration displacement on the running safety of railway vehicles makes it essential to establish a sound method of assessing these effects while designing railway structures seismically. This paper examines the seismic behavior of running railway vehicles, and proposes a code-type provision for the Running Safety Assessment (RSA) of vehicles based on the results of comparing the assessment indices of Spectral Intensity (SI) and Peak Velocity (PV). Moreover, to enable simple assessment of the running safety of a common seismic design, a nomogram based on the SI assessment index without the use of any calculation has been prepared.