Assessing Average Maintenance Frequencies and Service Lives of Railway Tracks: The Standard Element Approach

As track behavior varies in a wide range of service lives and maintenance demands must be specified. The Standard Element Approach provides a specification based on the most important boundary conditions influencing track behavior such as transport load, alignment, superstructure components as well as substructure qualities, and last but not least the functionality of the dewatering system. These parameters show several possible values. The mix of all of these parameter values describes tracks in the entire network. This clustering helps for decision making for strategic asset management: superstructure component use for different parameter sets, calculating average maintenance and renewal demands and thus the respective budgets for a sustainable track strategy avoiding or reducing backlogs. The Standard Element Approach works for all railway infrastructure assets, this chapter focuses on track in detail.