Design of a new high lateral resistance sleeper and performance comparison with conventional sleepers in a curved railway track by means of finite element models

The lack of lateral resistance in a curved railway track can produce misalignment problems due to the centrifugal forces when the trains pass through. Moreover, most of the times continuous welded rails (CWR) are used in nowadays railway tracks, which can induce the track buckling as a result of thermal loads caused by high temperature gradients. A new sleeper has been designed to provide higher lateral resistance of the track. A finite element model has been developed to analyze the lateral movements of an actual curved track subjected to lateral resistance problems. Then, variations on the f...