Benchmarking of premium rail material wear

Railway steel that offers a greater quality and extended life is described by the industry as premium rail. It is mainly used on areas of rail networks where accelerated wear, rolling contact fatigue or other rail related damage phenomena prevail. However, little performance data exists for these materials and where it does it is limited to a narrow set of contact conditions. The aim of this work was therefore to map premium rail performance across a range of Tγ 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%. Comparison with Martensitic Stainless Steel (MSS) laser clad material was made as a further benchmark. The results are shown in terms of Tγ and wear rate for both the rail and wheel discs. Material hardness maps were obtained of the full rail and the laboratory small scale specimen materials in order to correlate hardness with their wear behaviour. The purpose of this work is to understand the likelihood and rate 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.