Rail gauge face wear is on of the main issues in reducing maintenance cost. A number of interesting findings have been reported so far. Unfortunately, however, they virtually don't include mechanical information that would be useful for analysing the influence of applied forces and slip which is very difficult to identify or directly measure. The authors have been measuring the progress of gauge face wear at sharp curves to evaluate the influential factors of load, lateral force and the attack angle of wheelset by focusing on slip. On the other hand, laboratory simulation of gauge face wear has been carried out by using a large rolling contact machine to clarify their influence. The contact stresses between wheel and rail also were estimated with FEM elastic/plastic model to study the mechanism of gauge face wear. This paper describes the measured results at the actual track site, experimental results of wear simulation and stress analysis of wheel and rail.

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