Chapter: Civil : Railway Airport Harbour Engineering : Railway Engineering : Sleepers

Concrete Sleepers

The need for concrete sleepers has been felt mainly due to economic considerations coupled with changing traffic patterns. In the early days of Indian Railways, wood was the only material used for making sleepers in Europe.


Concrete Sleepers

 

The need for concrete sleepers has been felt mainly due to economic considerations coupled with changing traffic patterns. In the early days of Indian Railways, wood was the only material used for making sleepers in Europe. Even in those days, the occasional shortage of wooden sleepers and their increasing price posed certain problems and this gave a fillip to the quest for an alternative material for sleepers. With the development of concrete technology in the nineteenth century, cement concrete had established its place as a versatile building material and could be adopted suitably to meet the requirements of a railway sleeper. In the year 1877, Mr Monnier, a French gardener and inventor of reinforced concrete, suggested that cement concrete could be used for making sleepers for railway tracks. Monnier in fact designed a concrete sleeper and obtained a patent for it, but his design did not work successfully. The design was further developed and the railways of Austria and Italy produced the first concrete sleepers with a promising design around the turn of the nineteenth century. This was closely followed by other European railways, where large-scale trials of concrete sleepers were done mostly due to economic considerations.

 

However, not much progress could not be achieved till the second world war, when wooden sleepers practically disappeared from the European market and their prices shot up. Almost at the same time, as a result of extensive research carried out by French Railways and other European railways, the modern track was born. Heavier rail sections and long welded rails came into existence. The necessity of a heavier and better type of sleeper that could fit the modern track was felt. These conditions gave a spurt to the development of concrete sleepers and countries such as France, Germany, and Britain went a long way in developing concrete sleepers to perfection.

 

Development

 

The development of concrete sleepers that took place on various railway systems was mainly based on the following concepts of design.

 

(a)  RCC or prestressed sleepers similar in shape and size to wooden sleepers

 

(b) Block-type RCC sleepers connected by a steel tie bar

 

(c)  Prestressed concrete blocks and a steel or an articulated concrete tie bar

 

(d) Prestressed (pre-tensioned or post-tensioned) type of concrete sleepers These four concepts of design are the basis of the development of present-day

 

concrete sleepers.

 

Advantages and disadvantages

 

Concrete sleepers have the following advantages and disadvantages.

 

Advantages

 

(a)  Concrete sleepers, being heavy, lend more strength and stability to the track and are specially suited to LWR due to their great resistance to buckling of the track.

 

(b) Concrete sleepers with elastic fastenings allow a track to maintain better gauge, cross level, and alignment. They also retain packing very well.

 

(c)  Concrete sleepers, because of their flat bottom, are best suited for modern methods of track maintenance such as MSP and mechanical maintenance, which have their own advantages.

 

(d) Concrete sleepers can be used in track-circuited areas, as they are poor conductors of electricity.

 

(e)  Concrete sleepers are neither inflammable nor subjected to damage by pests or corrosion under normal circumstances.

 

(f)  Concrete sleepers have a very long lifespan, probably 40-50 years. As such rail and sleeper renewals can be matched, which is a major economic advantage.

 

(g)  Concrete sleepers can generally be mass produced using local resources.

 

Disadvantages

 

(a)  Handling and laying concrete sleepers is difficult due to their large weights. Mechanical methods, which involve considerable initial expenditure, have to be adopted for handling them.

 

(b) Concrete sleepers are heavily damaged at the time of derailment.

 

(c)  Concrete sleepers have no scrap value.

 

(d) Concrete sleepers are not suitable for beater packing.

 

(e)  Concrete sleepers should preferably be maintained by heavy 'on track' tampers.

 

Design considerations

 

Two different concepts are being adopted by German and French Engineers in designing the section of a concrete sleeper. The Germans, having adopted a beam type sleeper, consider the sleeper as a rigid, stiff, and continuous beam supported on a firm and unyielding bed. The French engineers however, consider the sleeper as two separate blocks connected by a tie bar and resting on a resilient ballast bed. The former design is based on static loading, while the latter theory caters for a slightly differential settlement of ballast support. As the calculations based on the latter theory are quite complicated and difficult, the sleeper design based on this concept has been evolved mostly on an empirical basis.

 

The forces and factors considered in the design of concrete sleepers are the following.

 

(a)  Forces acting on a sleeper

 

(b) Effects of the geometric form including shape, size, and weight

 

(c)  Effect of the characteristics of fastenings used

 

(d) Provision of failure against derailments

 

Need for concrete sleepers in India

 

In India there has been a chronic shortage of wooden sleepers over the last few decades. Wooden sleepers of various species in India have a short life-span of about 15-20 years. In view of this drawback of wooden sleepers, cast iron and steel trough sleepers have been used extensively. The consumption of these metal sleepers at present is quite high and Indian Railways consumes about 40% of the entire pig iron production in the country. There is a need to reduce pig iron consumption by the Railways so that the iron can be made available in large quantities for defence purposes and other heavy engineering industries. In addition, higher speeds, welding of rails, and installation of long welded rails have recently been introduced in Indian Railways. A sleeper for a long welded track has to be heavy and sturdy and should be capable of offering adequate lateral resistance to the track. Wooden and steel sleepers were found to be totally lacking in these requirements. Both these considerations led to investigations for selecting a suitable concrete sleeper for use on Indian Railways.

 

Loading conditions adopted by Indian Railways

 

Concrete sleepers have been designed by the Research Design and Standard Organization (RDSO) wing of Indian Railways for the following different loading conditions.

 

BG sleeper

 

(a)  15 t vertical loads at the rail seat.

 

(b) Vertical load of 15 t at rail seats plus a reaction at the centre of the sleeper equal to half of the load under the rail seat.

 

(c)  A vertical load of 13 t and a lateral load of 7 t directed towards the outside of one rail only.

 

The sleeper is designed to resist a bending moment of 1.33 t m at the rail seat and 0.52 t m at the centre of the sleeper.

MG sleeper

 

(a)  Vertical loads of 10 t at the rail seats plus a reaction at the centre of sleeper equal to half of that under the rail seat.

 

(b) Vertical loads of 8 t at the rail seats with 4.5 t lateral force directed towards the outside of one rail only.

 

Study Material, Lecturing Notes, Assignment, Reference, Wiki description explanation, brief detail
Civil : Railway Airport Harbour Engineering : Railway Engineering : Sleepers : Concrete Sleepers |


Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, DMCA Policy and Compliant

Copyright © 2018-2024 BrainKart.com; All Rights Reserved. Developed by Therithal info, Chennai.