Development of a probabilistic buckling analysis scheme for continuous welded rail track

Continuous welded rail (CWR) track has several advantages when compared with conventional jointed rail track. However, a thermally induced axial load can lead to the buckling of CWR tracks, which can result in train derailment. The buckling of CWR tracks is affected by several parameters, including the rail’s neutral temperature, misalignment of the rails and ballast resistance. Most of these parameters can be considered as random variables. A deterministic analysis approach is generally used to predict the buckling of CWR tracks; however, it can provide conservative results since it is based on the worst-case scenario of these buckling parameters. This paper presents a probabilistic buckling analysis scheme for CWR tracks.