Theoretical and Experimental Investigations on Railway Bridges Dating from 1856 to 1895

Abstract

When assessing the residual service life of old bridge structures, the question arises whether they can be still used after having exceeded the theoretical service life, or if they should be replaced by a new structure after having been newly classified, or if they are still usable after reinforcement or on the basis of shorter service intervals. The determination of the residual service life of a bridge results in the difficulty of recording the exact history of the loads and the state of the bridge. Insufficient knowledge about the strength and fatigue behaviour of old steels and constructions applied aggravate the above decision. This paper deals with experimental investigations on a complete bridge structure of the museum railway of the community of Blumberg as well as with two developed bridge structures of the Federal Railways. The results of these component tests are compared with data known from literature as well as with other results of simular investigations performed at the institute.(A) For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD 830553.