Construction and Current Maintenance of the Reinforced Ballast Layer of the Railway Track

Abstract

The article presents the ideas for the construction and the current maintenance of the reinforced plastic geogrid top ballast composed of crushed solid rock. Meanwhile, the reinforced ballast material acquires new properties, which lead to the formation of a composite material with new properties. In the reinforced material, only micro-deformations occur under the dynamic load, which is intrinsic to solid rock. In this case, laboratory simulation of reinforced ballast with a cyclic load showed that multilayer stabilization with three geogrids reduces settelment by 67% and does not require cleaning during the entire service life of the reinforced top ballast. The construction and the current maintenance of the composite structure make a real difference from the ballastless structure of the railway track as the work techniques with geosynthetics in the ballast subgrade are properly developed, and they are widely used during the repairs of railway track, because the development of the technology for the creation of reinforced geocomposite will not cause any problem.