Keywords: railway track, maintenance, under sleeper pads, stoneblowing, rubber particles, laboratory study.

Due to the limitation of ballast tamping during railway track maintenance, other alternative solutions are currently being developed, such as the use of Under Sleeper Pads (USPs) to damp the loads transmitted to the ballast (among other functions) and to reduce the rate of settlement. Another interesting maintenance process is known as stoneblowing, which reduces the ballast recompaction after maintenance, thereby avoiding a rapid degradation of the track geometry. This paper proposes a development of this last idea by using an alternative technique called stone-rubber blowing. This consists of combining the benefits of both previous processes through using rubber particles as part of the stones blown during the stoneblowing process in order to obtain an elastic granular layer that performs the function of USPs. Thus, this paper presents a laboratory study that examines the effect of using different quantities of rubber particles as flexible stones during the stoneblowing process, as well as comparing its impact with the application of USPs (of varying degrees of stiffness) in combination with the conventional maintenance tasks (tamping and stoneblowing). The results indicate that this solution allows for an important reduction in ballast degradation and settlement, improving the effectiveness of the stoneblowing process and presenting a comparable (or superior) behaviour to that recorded when employing USPs.

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