Experimental Study on the Effect of Preventive Grinding for Rail Shellings

Makoto ISHIDA, Noritsugi ABE
Rail shellings which are a kind of rolling contact fatigue failures have been causing a considerable cost for maintenance work including rail renewal not only on Shinkansen lines but also on narrow-gauge lines. Preventive grinding of rail head surface is at present the most reliable and effective as a measure to reduce the occurrence of rail shellings so that a lot of railway companies adopt it. However, since the effect of the preventive grinding is not made clear enough, it is of great interest to obtain the optimal grinding preriod and grinding amount (thickness form rail surface) at every grinding work. The authors have been carrying out experiments to estimate the effect of preventive grinding using a large rolling disc machine. In this paper the effect of the preventive grinding is discussed on the basis of statistical analysis of the experimental results.