Under intense ground shaking caused by an earthquake, running railway vehicles will be rolled to cause a large displacement resulting in derailment and/or overturn. Even though some methods for assessment of running safety of railway vehicles have been developed based on rigorous analytical models, they are unsuitable for practical design because of the necessity of sophisticated numerical analysis technique and a large number of input parameters. Therefore, it is significant to make the complicated methods simpler and usable for practical design. This paper examines the seismic behavior of running railway vehicles and proposes a code-type provision for assessment of the running safety of the vehicles subjected to earthquake motions based on the spectral intensity.

Copyright (c) 2002 Railway Technical Research Institute