Benchmarking of premium rail material wear

Railway steel that offers a greater quality and extended life is described by the industry as premium rail. Premium rail is mainly used on areas of rail networks where accelerated wear, RCF or other rail related damage phenomena prevail. However, little performance data exists for these materials and where it does it is limited to one set of contact conditions. The aim of this work was therefore to map premium rail performance across a range of T? Contact conditions to benchmark against standard grade R260 rail. Laboratory tests using a twin disc machine were performed to determine the wear performance of four premium rail grades against R8 wheel material, at various slip conditions of 1-20%. The results are shown in terms of T? And cyclic wear rate for both the rail and wheel discs. The purpose of this work is to understand the likelihood of wear in different wheel/rail contact conditions and to produce enough wear information for the premium rail that could be used in prediction tools for comparison with other materials and contact conditions.