Psychophysical Evaluation of Railway Vibrational Discomfort on Curved Sections

A series of experiments for evaluating the railway riding comfort on curved sections were carried out with subjects riding on trains or mock-up vehicles. In this paper, we propose a riding comfort index on curved sections, which uses stationary lateral acceleration jointly with peak-to-peak lateral acceleration and show acceptable values of discomfort. This paper also proposes an index for evaluating the riding comfort of a tilting train passing transition curves, to which roll motion is added. In addition, we make it possible to quantitatively express the relationship between the discomfort of passengers and the tilt angle of the floor when a train stops on a canted curve.