Development of a Raised Rail-Road Crossing

Abstract

When a road and rail intersect, a level crossing (LC) is a cheaper alternative to over or under pass infrastructure. Australia currently has approximately 20,000 LCs; annually 37 deaths on average occur mainly as a result of the road vehicles failing to obey warning signals. In this research, it is hypothesised that the current design of LC does not deter the road vehicle drivers from accelerating through the crossing, whilst a raised crossing consisting of ramps and recesses to house the rails would. This hypothesis is proved as valid through a multi-body dynamic simulation modelling method applied to a road vehicle passing through a raised crossing at various speeds. The efficacy of the raised crossing is demonstrated through numerical examples that show increase in the speed of the road vehicle reduces the vertical acceleration of the driver cabin in a LC whilst the same increases the raised crossing. Where the road vehicles fail to stop and subsequently impact a running train laterally or being impacted by a train longitudinally, the derailed wheelsets impact the sides of the recesses in the raised crossing and thereby mitigating the adverse effects of the crash. This paper summarises the train-vehicle collision induced derailment process and presents the maximum impact force time series obtained from various simulations. Finally, structural design options for the raised crossing to resist the impact forces have been explored using an explicit finite element modelling.