Monitoring and Modeling of Differential Movement at Railway Transitions
The Federal Railroad Administration sponsored a research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to conduct laboratory and field research of railroad bridge transitions between September 2011 and December 2015. In this report, researchers present an interpretation of Amtrak and Norfolk Southern (NS) railway transitions and 3-dimensional numerical analyses of the instrumented transitions using available software packages to develop recommendations for future designs. The team used data from previous studies, including field measurements along the Amtrak Northeast Corridor near Chester, Pennsylvania, and two NS N-Line bridges in southern West Virginia, and the results of the numerical modeling that were calibrated using field data from the monitored railway transitions.