RTR 4/2010 3 Editorial The final contribution dealing with “infrastructure” takes the form of a report on the new railway tunnel in the city centre of Leipzig. This is the first S-Bahn tunnel constructed in the centre of a German city using the twin-bore principle. One of its interesting details is its system of electrification, using roofmounted power rails. The second main topic in the volume deals with new components for railway wagons, passenger stock and information systems. The electro-hydraulic brake presented here is admittedly still only at its experimental and testing stage. It looks as if it is going to be able to brake more effectively, while also consuming less energy. Another report deals with the installation of Ethernet systems in passenger coaches for the provision of information for passengers. A purpose-made broadband wireless system is capable of replacing elements that up until now have proved critical, such as the couplings for sensitive electrical lines carrying messages between two vehicles. The precondition is naturally the use of the correct, robust technology, and here it helps to resort to components that have already been tried and tested in industrial environments. Information technology is represented with a contribution from Australia. Richard Hammerton presents the system architecture of the new control and information system (CIS), installed in the greater-Melbourne region for the metropolitan and regional train network. Finally, as readers would expect, this issue of RTR concludes with a review of the 2010 edition of the world’s largest specialist trade fair for the railway sector, InnoTrans in Berlin. We trust, ladies and gentlemen, that you will find many useful inputs for your own professional work as you read through the reports in this magazine. Kindest regards, We are pleased to publish this edition of European Rail Technology Review (RTR) once again with news of the latest progress from the world of railways. This time, we concentrate first and foremost on further advances in railway technology. Dissemination of knowledge in this field and the spread of information about new components and processes is the aim of this magazine, and that is what it has been doing for fifty years now. The first main topic in this issue is railway infrastructure. We begin with a scientific treatise on the vibration behaviour of concrete sleepers under the load of trains running at high speeds. After only a few years of operating its first two high-speed lines, which were opened in in 1991 (i.e. Hannover –Würzburg and Mannheim–Stuttgart), the then Deutsche Bundesbahn was forced to recognise that the ballast laid on them was showing signs of premature abrasive wear. Some of it even needed to be replaced after only five years in service, namely where was a hard material underneath it, such as bridges or the floors of tunnels. Simultaneously with the replacement of the worn-out ballast, softer rail pads were incorporated too and, on a number of particularly conspicuous bridges, matting was inserted under the ballast. Dr. Pahnke, the responsible expert at the time in the Bundesbahn’s centre office for technical matters in Munich, took charge of tackling this whole problem, along with Dr. Müller-Boruttau and Dr. Breitsamter. The outcome of their painstaking, time-consuming investigation is presented here. It was recognised that the trains (ICE trains sets, to be precise) induced vibrations in the concrete sleepers lying on the ballast at frequencies close to those of the sleepers’ natural frequency and with virtually no damping. The recommended remedy is to fix vibration-damping pads to the sleepers, since just elastic pads with no damping effect are inadequate for this purpose. A further topic covered in this issue is the properties of rails. Under this heading we report on the behaviour of rails made of harder materials than usual in curves and points. For special types of applications, rails embedded elastically in prefabricated slabs offer a valid alternative. Our final report in this block deals with experience with the RU 800 S track-reconstruction machine, which has been designed to handle several of the work processes involved in the replacement of both ballast and rails. It is able to complete its work with very much shorter periods of track closure, and the newly laid track is of a better quality. Dr.-Ing. Eberhard Jänsch Editor-in-chief Dear Readers, (Eberhard Jänsch)
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