Optimisation of Rolling Stock Wheelset Life through Better Understanding of Wheel Tyre Degradation

Since the 1990's the fleet of the Dutch Railways showed a dramatic decrease in wheel tyre life. This lifetime reduction led to an unacceptable increase in life cycle costs. Therefore Lloyd's Register Rail has proposed to NedTrain to investigate the possibilities of improving the wheel tyre life. Three improvements were determined as most promising and relatively easy to achieve: - Profile optimisation for Rolling Contact Fatigue (RCF) reduction - a new wheel profile has been developed with a better resistance against rolling contact fatigue of the wheel tread. The profile has been implemented on single deck intercity trains and shows an increase in wheel tyre life of 30%. - Selection of improved wheel tyre materials - combining information from literature and experiences of manufacturers five alternative wheel tyre materials have been selected and are now being tested in practice. - Optimisation of the maintenance strategy - an alternative, preventative maintenance regime has been developed. With this Scraping regime, during short term maintenance every wheel is reprofiled. Higher mileages are reached and savings on life cycle costs up to 50% and more have been achieved. Unplanned maintenance goes down with $30{\sim}60%$. The results from field tests, using a reference group for comparison, and preliminary results after implementation show that the increase in wheel tyre life that is achieved with this project is significant. The results will continue to be monitored using the asset management tool 'Wheel Watch', that was specially developed for this project and is also described in this paper.