Keywords: high speed line, railway embankment, geotechnics, surface wave methods.

The renewal of existent railway lines requires an accurate characterization of the nature, mechanical and moisture properties of the Railway Embankment (RE) layers to select appropriate maintenance and/or renewal actions, especially concerning local disorders. A specific zone of the Northern Europe high speed line is the subject of frequent maintenance effort probably due to strong variations in soils properties or to bad drainage conditions. A specific geological, geotechnical and geophysical investigations mission was carried out along the line to understand the origin of the observed phenomenon. Classical geotechnical measurements are not able to determine the source of the disorder except for VS obtained from BE tests that indicate strong changes in a specific layer. However, these conventional geotechnical measurements still remain local, destructive and with low yields in terms of auscultate linear. Thus surface-wave methods, were deployed along the line. 1D VS models obtained along the line clearly show strong contrasts in mechanical properties at depth. Such method can be considered to develop a control criterion of the RE state.

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