Abstract
Recent reports imply that railway vehicles could derail solely by the ground motions of earthquakes. Thus, we should further study the derailment mechanism of these cases, to pursue to minimize the risk of railway system. We developed our original vehicle dynamics simulation and employed it for numerical analyses. We obtained the following outcomes. (1) Most of derailments are brought as the result of the rocking motion of a vehicle by track excitations underneath. The derailing motions are observed similarly regardless of vehicle speed. (2) The excitation amplitudes for derailment are influenced by vehicle speed particularly in lower input frequencies.
