Technical and Economical Investigation on Concrete Pavements for Railway Passenger Lines (Technical Note)

Ballast as a part of the railway system plays an important role in the operation of the railways and also has a great impact on repair and maintenance activities. Hence most of the repair and maintenance activities in traditional railway systems are due to the defections in the ballast layer and therefore most of the maintenance budget is spent on repairing these defects. These repair and maintenance activities are usually very costly and time consuming and force the line to be closed for quite a long time. These kinds of problems led to the elimination of the ballast layer and the use of some other elements such as concrete slabs or beam in railways. The results show that the time and money needed for repair and maintenance of concrete slab tracks are much less than ballasted tracks, the technical and economical evaluations also confirm these results. In this paper technical and economical aspects of slab track systems were investigated with the help of national and international experiences and it was concluded that they are competitive solutions to the ballasted tracks in passenger railways.