Influence of the ballasted track on the dynamic properties of a truss railway bridge

This article presents numerical and experimental analyses of a steel truss railway bridge. The main feature of this work is that dynamic experiments have been performed before and after the ballasted track was placed on the bridge. Consequently, it has been possible to quantify the effect of the ballast and the rails on the dynamic properties of the bridge. For that, two finite element models, with and without the ballasted track, have been implemented and calibrated using the experimental results. It appears that the ballast gives an additional stiffness of about 25–30% for the lowest three eigenmodes. This additional stiffness can be only partly explained by the stiffness of the ballast. In fact, it seems that this additional stiffness is also due to a change in the support conditions.