The Federal Railroad Administration has awarded a $225,932 research grant to the University of California at San Diego to continue studying thermal-induced stress in Continuous Welded Rail (CWR) that can lead to rail buckling in hot weather.
Being able to better understand and detect when rail buckling is likely to occur will improve safety and the operation of freight and passenger trains.
The work to be performed under the grant involves development of a model that can reliably measure and predict the response of CWR as stress is applied to it. Future work will involve laboratory testing of the model, and development of prototype automated detection equipment for full-scale field testing.
