High speed rail - the current challenge to Polish rail transport

Abstract

The increase of the role of rail transport in comparison with road and air ones was an important task for transport engineering in western Europe and Japan in the 1970s. Now the problem is not completely closed but the majority of the establishments formed in the beginning were successively solved. The main assumptions could be grouped into environmental protection and sustainability, decreasing the travel time connected with accessibility, safety, comfort for passengers, considering freight transport, as well. The high speed of the moving train was the main criteria of any engineer approach i.e. from the point of view of energy safety, limiting pollution, ability to transport thousands of people and tons of cargo. High Speed Rail - (HSR) means the speed between 250 to 400 km/h. This divides tracks into two groups: ordinary tracks and special ones, which results in two possible ways: adopting existing tracks or building new railways. Recently the program of HSR has been decided to put in motion in Poland. The situation here was very complicated. Many abandons such as complete lack of road highways, backwardness in air transport as well as rail transport, which means abandons in track conditions and rolling stock. At least, actually no existing haulage transport. In those circumstances, any rational first step was to be taken i.e. a technical diagnosis and an estimation of the existing railway system including culverts and bridges as important elements of trucks. The paper presented here contains a short survey of statical and dynamical field test results and FEM analyses as an extension to the train speeds 1.2ź350 = 420 km/h