The fracture of a rail as a result of the development of fatigue cracking is considered as a serious event in the rail industry as it is likely to result in vehicle derailment with a high probability of loss of life.
Cracks in rails have been appearing on the head of the rail as a result of mechanical damage due to wheel/rail contact stresses, or the foot of the rail emanating from corrosion pits. More recently, since the method of joining rails by fishplates was abandoned in favour of continuous welded rail, another source of cracking was introduced arising from various weld defects (e.g. porosity, lack of fusion, shrinkage stresses etc.). Infrastructure managers are devoting a large amount of effort to ensure that the integrity of the rail track network is preserved by conducting regular inspections involving up to date NDE techniques. Nevertheless, the development of cracks in rails is unavoidable. The rail damage prediction tools (such as VAMPIRE) currently employed by the industry are based on empirical relations based on the cumulative damage sustained by the axle weight and volume of traffic passing over a rail (J. Evans, 2003). These models do not take into account the development or presence of flaws. It can be stated that decisions on replacement of a rail are not made on the basis of a fracture mechanics based flaw severity assessment (a damage tolerance approach).
This work has undertaken the study of fatigue cracks in rails using FEA modeling and analytical solutions to provide a tool to rail NDE inspectors for the quick assessment of the severity of surface breaking and embedded cracks in rails. The work does not investigate crack initiation and propagation phenomena on the heads of rails, but concentrates mainly on cracks initiating and propagating from bending loads in the foot of the rail as a result of passing trains.