The New Simulation Approach to Tramway Safety Against Derailment Evaluation in Term of Vehicle Dynamics

Abstract

The existing European standard EN 14363 covers all necessary tests for different railway vehicles, but it is inadequate for tram vehicles, especially in safety against a derailment examination. Its operational conditions are much different. Trams overcome horizontal curves with much smaller radii than railway vehicles. There is a large diversity in wheel-rail pairing, i.e. almost every public transport operator uses a different wheel profile. In the running gear design much more rubber-metal elements are used in order to ensure a low-floor interior and to keep the kinematic envelope. Apart from standard vehicle configuration, i.e., a carbody on two bogies, in modern tram designs numerous arrangements are applied: wagons with one outer bogie, wagons with one centered bogie, wagons without bogies (sedan) etc., where twisting shims cannot be used to achieve the required twist. The described issues imply that the methodology of safety against derailment described in EN 14363 standard cannot be applied without any modifications. This paper presents a new proposal for a simulation safety against derailment for a vehicle with an arbitrary configuration of wagons and running gears. The numerical analyses have been performed by means of the Simpack Rail software.