Abstract
Steel railway bridges were constructed early, and the number of the bridges which there is more than 60 years after construction exceeds half of existing bridges today, and the number of the bridges needing repair, reinforcement and replacement tends to increase. Because the replacement of existing bridges has a long construction period and enormous expenses for the installing and removing the temporary line, girder and abutments, it is urgent to establish both life extension and seismic reinforcement method without the replacement for the existing bridges.
Based on such a background, authors suggested the rational reinforcement method by the structure integration of steel girder-abutment type bridges. This paper describes the details of the integrated method of steel girder, abutments and backfills. It is explained the reinforcing experiment to the full-scale steel girder-abutment type bridge. In addition, the paper shows a series of experiments to investigate the effect of train vibrations to the freshly mixed concrete after casting, which decide the concrete casting condition for the integration between the steel girder and abutments. Finally it is described the effectiveness of the proposal method on economy and construction period comparing with the conventional replacement methods of existing bridges.
