In the planning stages for new buildings or transit systems, the effects of railway induced
ground-borne vibration need to be considered. The propagation of vibration from the ground
to a receiving room is a complex problem. It is common practise, within vibration assessment,
for the buildings vibration response to be acquired empirically by ether measuring the
response of the building in question via an impact method, measuring the response on an
equivalent type of building, or using pre existing published data (from the 70s and 80s) to
derive a ground to building transfer functions. This paper compares, as a method of evaluating
a building transfer function, impact method with actual rail pass-bys and recently collected
response with published generalised response curves. The results presented suggests that,
when using the impact method excitation process (point source), the distance of impact
location to the building foundation is critical, drastically affecting the resulting transfer
function. In addition when using train pass-bys as the excitation process, train length is shown
to have an influence on the transfer function assessed. The pre-published data are also shown
to have limitations for more recent types of construction
