This paper, based on a lecture given during tour undertaken in May 2014 of key railway establishments in China, consists of a brief introduction to the history and comparisons of railways in the UK and China, a description of rail speed-up in the last few decades in the UK, and notes of current high speed trains. Similar brief details are given of high speed in Europe. Brief mention is made of comparative railway safety. The development of high speed rail in China is discussed and the UK High Speed development plan is briefly introduced. The paper concluded that high speed train system has tremendous advantages in increasing the efficiency and convenience of transport without adding to carbon generation.

This paper discusses some key problems faced in high-speed train operation. These problems include: wheel tread concave wear causing the lateral oscillation of the train in operation, wheel roundness higher-order polygonal wear leading to fierce vertical vibration of wheel/rail and abnormal vibration noise of the coach interior of the train thus causing loosening and cracking of the train bogie parts, short pitch rail corrugation generation on the part of the track, fracture of cushion layer and road base fracture of the track, and increased noise inside and outside the train. At present, the mechanism of the occurrence and development of these phenomena is still not fully understood. This paper briefly reviews the related research on these problems in China and abroad, including many important recent papers and the articles published in this special issue. They make outstanding contributions to solving these problems, and include important work on train-track coupling large system theory, the relationship theory and technique of wheel/rail, and the vibration-noise reduction technology of the train.

Short pitch rail corrugations were observed on a recently opened Chinese high-speed line. On the basis of field measurements and observations of corrugations occurred on the high-speed line, a 3D transient rolling contact model is developed using the explicit finite element (FE) method to investigate high-speed vehicle-track interactions in the presence of rail corrugations. The rotational and translational movements of the wheel are introduced as initial conditions in the model. The frictional rolling contact between the wheel and the corrugated rail is solved by a penalty method based surface-to-surface contact algorithm with Coulomb’s law of friction. The contact filter effect is considered automatically by the finite size of the contact patch. Through specifying a time-dependent driving torque applied to the wheel axle, the tangential vehicle-track interaction on the corrugated rail is analyzed in the time domain together with the normal one at different traction levels and at rolling speeds of up to 500 km/h. This analysis focuses on detailed contact solutions, such as distributions of the pressure, surface shear stress, Von Mises (V-M) stress, and frictional work. The corrugation dimensions, traction level, and rolling speed are varied to investigate their influences, building a solid basis for further studying the material damage mechanisms. A theory is proposed based on the simulations to explain the observed phenomenon that the corrugation gradually stabilizes. The traditional multi-body approach is found to overestimate the dynamic wheel-rail interaction on a corrugated rail.

A 3D dynamic model of a high-speed train coupled with a flexible ballast track is developed and is presented in this study. In this model, each vehicle is modeled as a 42 degrees of freedom multi-body system, which takes into consideration the nonlinear dynamic characteristics of the suspensions. A detailed inter-vehicle connection model including nonlinear couplers and inter-vehicle dampers, and the linear tight-lock vestibule diaphragm is established to simulate the effect of the end connections of neighboring vehicles on dynamic behavior. The track is modeled as a traditional three-layer discrete elastic support model. The rails are assumed to be Timoshenko beams supported by discrete sleepers. Each sleeper is treated as an Euler beam and the ballast bed is replaced by equivalent rigid ballast bodies. The reliability of the present model is then validated through a detailed numerical simulation comparison with the commercial software SIMPACK, with the effect of the track flexibility on the train/track interaction being analyzed simultaneously. The proposed model is finally applied to investigate the difference between dynamic performances obtained using the entire-train/track model (TTM) and the single-vehicle/track model (VTM). Several key dynamic performances, including vibration frequency response, ride comfort, and curving performance, calculated by the two types of dynamic models are compared and discussed. The numerical results show that there is a significant difference between the dynamic behaviors obtained by VTM and TTM, and that inter-vehicle connections have an important influence on the dynamic behavior of high-speed vehicles.

The objective of this paper is to develop a new wheel-rail contact model, which is suitable for considering the effect of wheelset bending deformation on wheel-rail contact behavior at high speeds. Dummies of the two half rigid wheelset are introduced to describe the spacial positions of the wheels of the deformed wheelset. In modeling the flexible wheelset, the first two wheelset bending modes are considered. Based on the modal synthesis method, these mode values of the wheelset axle are used to solve the motion equations of the flexible wheelset axle modeled as an Euler-Bernoulli beam. The wheel is assumed to be rigid and always perpendicular to the deformed axle at the wheel centre. In the vehicle model, two bogies and one car body are modeled as lumped masses. Spring-damper elements are adopted to model the primary and secondary suspension systems. The ballasted track is modeled as a triple layer discrete elastic supported model. Two high-speed vehicle-track models, one considering rigid wheelset models and the other considering flexible wheelset models, are used to analyze the differences of the numerical results of the two models in both frequency and time domains. In the simulation, a random high-speed railway track irregularity is used as wheel-rail excitations. Wheel-rail forces are calculated and analyzed in the time and frequency domains. The results clarify that this new contact model can characterize very well the influence of the first two bending modes of the wheelset on contact behavior.

This work presents a detailed investigation conducted into the relationships between wheel polygonal wear and wheel/rail noise, and the interior noise of high-speed trains through extensive experiments and numerical simulations. The field experiments include roundness measurement and characteristics analysis of the high-speed wheels in service, and analysis on the effect of re-profiling on the interior noise of the high-speed coach. The experimental analysis shows that wheel polygonal wear has a great impact on wheel/rail noise and interior noise. In the numerical simulation, the model of high-speed wheel/rail noise caused by the uneven wheel wear is developed by means of the high-speed wheel-track noise software (HWTNS). The calculation model of the interior noise of a high-speed coach is developed based on the hybrid of the finite element method and the statistic energy analysis (FE-SEA). The numerical simulation analyses the effect of the polygonal wear characteristics, such as roughness level, polygon order (or wavelength), and polygon phase, on wheel/rail noise and interior noise of a high-speed coach. The numerical results show that different polygon order with nearly the same roughness levels can cause different wheel/rail noises and interior noises. The polygon with a higher roughness level can cause a larger wheel/rail noise and a larger interior noise. The combination of different polygon phases can make a different wheel circle diameter difference due to wear, but its effect on the interior noise level is not great. This study can provide a basis for improving the criteria for high-speed wheel re-profiling of China’s high-speed trains.

This paper presents a detailed discussion of the experimental analysis of the external noise produced by a Chinese high-speed train traveling at different speeds. Based on the delay and sum beam-forming method, a microphone array with 78 microphones was used to measure the external noise produced by the train moving at speeds of up to 390 km/h. The experiment and its analysis showed that the main noise produced by the train originates in three areas: the wheel/rail system (or bogies), the pantograph, and the inter-coach gaps of the train. The frequency characteristics and sound exposure level (SEL) of these main sources were analyzed for different speeds. In the range of 5000 Hz, the SELs of the three main noise sources are clearly identified. Along the vertical height of the train, as seen from the rail head, the maximum noise levels always occur in the wheel/rail area. At different measurement field points, the predominant noise components of the total noise have different frequencies that vary with the train speed. Furthermore, at the measurement points, the rolling noise has a greater contribution to the total noise than the aerodynamic noise. The experimental results and their corresponding analysis are very useful for the control and reduction of the external noise produced by high-speed trains.

The high-speed train makes strict demands on the long-term performance of the track-subgrade. The key scientific point of research on the performance of high-speed railway subgrade is the mechanical and hydraulic properties of the subgrade under the coupling of dynamic cycles, dry-wet cycles, and temperature cycles. Much further research work should be done for the maintenance of existing high-speed railways and the new construction of high-speed railways.