Need for Rail Structure Interaction for Railway Bridges having Continuous Welded Rails

In case of Metro Railway bridges, the widely used Continuous Welded Rail (CWR) is directly fastened to the concrete block placed above the bridge deck with the help of Rail Fasteners. Hence, there is a need of detailed study to understand the transfer of forces between deck and rail and also to the substructure in terms of Rail Structure Interaction phenomenon. In this paper, comparison of two different railway bridges i.e. one with Rail Structure Interaction and other without Rail Structure Interaction is studied in terms of additional stresses in the rail. The connection between deck and rail is done with the help of Multi linear Elastic Link and Rigid link to study the effect on the structure. This paper also illustrates the amount of additional rail stresses generated for model with rail Expansion Joint (REJ) and model without REJ (Continuously Welded Rail) to study need of axial rail stresses using software MIDAS Civil 2014.