The railway noise is generated by various parts of rails and cars, such as wheels, driving devices and other components. In order to reduce the noise effectively, we have developed methods to analyze the railway noise and investigate its contributions. By this method, we investigated the railway noise phenomenon, and obtained a result that the noise generated by wheels (wheel noise) is a major noise source in the case of cars with wheels of a particular type. We investigated the characteristics of wheel vibration by impulse response and measured the noise around the bogies in running. As a result, it was proved that wheels vibrate and radiate sound intensively at the natural frequencies of wheel tread. This paper reports the results of impulse response and field tests and numerical solutions of wheel vibration and sound.

Copyright (c) 2001 Railway Technical Research Institute