Probabilistic fatigue life estimates for riveted railway bridges

ABSTRACT: A large percentage of the railway bridges in the UK rail network and around Europe are of riveted construction exceeding in many cases 100 years of age. The remaining fatigue life of these bridges is difficult to estimate due to the uncertainties regarding the fatigue behaviour of wrought-iron and older steel material, which was used for their construction, as well as the actual loading and the number of cycles that these bridges have experienced in the past and will be experiencing in the future. This paper presents probabilistic fatigue life estimates for a stringer-to-cross-girder connection of a typical riveted rail bridge. On the loading side, the problem is randomised through the frequency of train traffic, dynamic amplification and the ratio between actual and calculated stresses. On the response side, S-N curves pertaining to the various assumed classes for the connection details and the Miner sum are also treated as random