2017 Volume 58 Issue 2 Pages 119-125
Impact noise induced by rail joints is one of the major sources of wayside noise on railways. Field tests were conducted around a rail joint on a commercial meter-gauged railway line. It was found out that the sound power of the total impact noise increased proportionally to train speed to the power of 2.4 in the speed range of 40 km/h to 100 km/h. Estimation of contribution to impact noise from rails and sleepers based on their vibration showed that noise generated by sleepers is the dominant source of impact noise below 500 Hz, whilst above 1 kHz it is from the rails. A prediction model indicated that modifying track parameters could potentially reduce impact noise.
