Train Running Safety on Bridges: Methodologies and Applications

Train running safety is a major concern among railway engineers, since a derailment may cause significant personal and material damages.Such issue becomes particularly worrying if the derailment occurs on bridges, especially at high-speeds, where the consequences may be even worse.The development of large high speed (HS) railway networks around the globe characterized by strict design requirements led to the construction of lines with more than 75% of their extension built viaducts and bridges.Consequently, the probability of a high-speed train derail over a bridge during the occurrence of hazards that might jeopardize its safety increases substantially.The present paper is, therefore, a summary of the work performed by the author in the last years about the methodologies and applications on the analysis of the stability of trains when subjected to external actions, such as crosswinds or earthquake.This work also addresses future challenges regarding the studies that still have to be carried out to go from the explicit, but time-consuming, derailment analysis with train-track-bridge interaction models to more simple methods that may be adopted in codes and standards to be adopted by bridge design engineers in a daily basis.