Published Paper Details:

With the huge demand for high speed railways across the world, major emphasis is laid on safety and a reduction in the journey time. There is much talk about high speed trains plying at over 200 km/h in certain sectors of India. The first of such sectors being talked about is the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor, which would drastically slash the journey time by around 5 hours. This leads to huge quasi-static and dynamic loads on the track, which further accelerates the process of the formation of fines, ballast degradation (through abrasion, attrition and grain fracturing) and a potential accumulation of excess pore water pressure and high vertical deformations in the subgrade. Furthermore, this pumping action generated leads to an infiltration of fines into the subgrade. Under poor conditions of drainage and workmanship, severe cases of fouling occur where the sleepers are surrounded by mud that retains a pool of water around them. To prevent such formation of mud holes in the soil, the implementation of proper drainage is essential to prevent stagnation of water at the ends of the sleeper. This also contributes to the stability of the track substructure by ensuring separation of the fine subgrade soil underneath with the coarse ballast above. Certain advances have been made in the field of mud hole management. In their manual, A.R.T.C. Ltd. (2001, 2013) pointed out the stagnation of water due to the lack of drainage being the major contributor to mud hole formation. Various methodologies for the modelling of the ballast and subgrade layer have been suggested. Kruse and Popp (2003) suggested the use of the Molecular Dynamics method to model the granular material, where every single stone of the ballast is taken into account along with calculation of the contact forces from the overlap areas of particle geometries. Modelling of resilient rubber pads with future applications to a reduction in the ballast settlements have been performed by Knothe et al. (2003)