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This paper outlines novel concepts to address structural shortcomings in modern fixed railway track systems made of concrete, focusing on enhancing structural safety, durability, and fatigue resistance.It introduces Ultra-High Performance Fibre Reinforced Cemetitious Composite (UHPFRC) as a novel building material, known for its dense, fine-grained matrix strengthened with a high amount of short slender steel fibers.UHPFRC has the capacity to transmit tensile stresses up to 7-10 MPa in the elastic and 10-16 MPa in the strain-hardening domains while maintaining fatigue resistance up to 70% in the elastic and 45% in the strain-hardening domain.UHPFRC remains crack-free under service conditions.This contribution presents three concepts of the high-performance fixed railway tracks built in UHPFRC: 1.Fixed track with a slab thickness of 100 mm.It has been developed to reduce the self-weight of the railway track on bridges and to increase the clearance in the cross-section of existing tunnels.2. Fixed track for the rapid replacement of damaged sleepers.The concept guarantees a high track alignment quality.It can also be applied for constructing new fixed tracks designed as mass-spring systems.3. Single-span bridge girder with an integrated fixed railway track.
Hochuli et al. (Tue,) studied this question.