Study on stability of railway embankments depending on the scale of collapse by rainfall and loading tests

Abstract

The temporal restoration of the damaged embankment does not fully consider the performance of the damaged embankment, leaving room for further study in determining the need for temporal restoration and the restoration specifications. In this study, the full-scale model of the railway embankment was subjected to rainfall test to evaluate the performance of the damaged embankment empirically. In addition, loading test were conducted at each collapse stage to evaluate the stability of the damaged embankment. The experimental results showed that when the collapse of the embankment was limited to a specific range, the collapse did not progress against loading equivalent to that of a train. The results also suggest that the stability analysis model can reproduce a slip surface of the collapsed size up to the mid-slope of the embankment by using saturated-unsaturated seepage flow analysis to evaluate the water level and degree of saturation in the embankment and to take them into account.