2012 Volume 68 Issue 1 Pages 199-212
An incident of rockfall may trigger serious damage to the safety as well as the after-the-event maintenance of railway transportation. In an attempt to minimize such damage caused by rockfall incident, the railway companies regularly in spect the concerned slopes along the railway, and take necessary measures. In the current practice, however, it is very difficult to make a full control of slopes in danger spreading over the wide area due to the limited human and financial resources. Accordingly, it is urgently needed for the railway firms to establish cost-effective as well as reliable system for the slope management. A risk map based on the impact statement of rockfall to railway track is of great use for not only enhancing the efficiency of slope inspection, but also planning the disaster prevention of railway. In this paper, a methodology for establishing a risk map by considering the impact statement to railway truck in a quantitative manner is proposed. In so doing, the rockfall movement on a slope was numerically simulated in match with each categorized type of slopes. The applicability of this proposed method for the slope management practice is examined based on a number of case histories.
