Determining The Geometrical Parameters Of Exploited Rail Track Using Approximating Spline Functions

The process of railway track adjustment is a task which includes bringing, in geometrical terms, the actual track axis to the position ensuring safe and efficient traffic of rail vehicles. The initial calculation stage of this process is to determine approximately the limits of sections of different geometry, i.e. straight lines, arcs and transition curves. This allows to draw up a draft alignment design, which is subject to control the position relative to the current state. In practice, this type of a project rarely meets the requirements associated with the values of corrective alignments. Therefore, it becomes necessary to apply iterated correction of a solution in order to determine the final project, allowing to introduce minor corrections while maintaining the assumed parameters of the route. The degree of complexity of this process is defined by the quality of determining a preliminary draft alignment design. Delimitation of the sections for creation ofcreatingsuch a design, is usually done by using the curvature diagram (InRail v8.7 Reference Guide [1], Jamka et al [2], Strach [3]), which is, however, sensitive to the misalignment of the track and measurement errors. In their paper Lenda and Strach [4] proposed a new method for creating curvature diagram, based on approximating spline function, theoretically allowing, inter alia, to reduce vulnerability to interference factors. In this study, the method to determine a preliminary draft alignment design for the track with severe overexploitation was used, and thus in the conditions adversely affecting the accuracy of the conducted readings. The results were compared to the ones obtained using classical curvature diagram. The obtained results indicate that the method allows to increase the readability of a curvature graph, which at considerable deregulation of a track takes an irregular shape, difficult to interpret. The method also favourably affects the accuracy of determining the initial parameters of the project, reducing the entire process of calculation.