Stability evaluation of railway embankment with drainage blanket by rainfall tests

Abstract

Railway embankments subject to elevated pore water pressure, such as those in catchment terrain, must have drainage blankets installed during construction. However, the specifications of these blankets are empirically determined. In this study, rainfall experiments were conducted to evaluate the effect of the drainage blanket on the stability of railway embankments. The results showed that the drainage blanket contributed to suppressing the rise of the water level at the toe of the embankment and that the embankment did not collapse even when the cumulative rainfall was about nine times higher than the cumulative rainfall that caused the typical embankment to collapse. Considering the water level evaluated by seepage analysis, the stability analysis of the embankment suggests that it is possible to express the slip surface that agrees with the experimentally confirmed collapse shape.