Keywords: rolling contact fatigue, wheel-rail interface, yaw stiffness, wheel quality, track access charge.

This paper will show ways to improve the cost effectiveness and other aspects of railway performance, by analysing interface parameters between rolling stock and infrastructure. In railway systems, the technical functions and parameters of rolling stock and infrastructure are highly interacting. Developments in the Netherlands showed that optimisation between vehicle and infrastructure design and maintenance need much attention, which risks being neglected in a separated railway setting. The research initiated identifies parameters that are important for all railways, and highlights projects and actual improvements, achieved or planned, in the vehicle/infrastructure interface on the Dutch railway network. The paper describes the selection of parameters that show a potential business case or results in cost effectiveness. For these parameters, the solutions undertaken or being implemented are described. It can be demonstrated in the data from ProRail that the process resulted (in the last 10 years) in a reduction of life cycle costs, due to rolling contact fatigue, of around 50 million euros. Most improvements resulted from infrastructure-sided measures but also, more recently, from measures at the vehicle side of the interface.

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