Keywords: railway track, moving load, beam on elastic foundation, Winkler foundation, critical velocity, finite element. .

Good tracks are the basic requirements of an effective railway system. Railway tracks are modelled as an infinitely long beam on elastic foundation (BEF). Wherein the track super structure comprising of rails and sleepers is idealised as an infinitely long beam and the ballast and sub ballast layers are treated as linear spring elements. Classical analytical solutions for dynamic response of infinitely long BEF due to static concentrated load and dynamic moving load are available. These analytical solutions become more involved, if certain modifications are included in the BEF model. From this point of view, it is desirable, if a finite element model can be used to obtain the dynamic response of infinitely long beam on flexible foundation. In a finite element model, the BEF is modelled using a beam element with spring elements. The length of the model is finite. In this paper, the aim is to obtain a solution in the central region, which matches the classical solution of the BEF. Getting reasonably accurate solutions in the central region will depend on many parameters, such as, the finite length of the model, total number of modes to be considered and the length of discretised element. A detailed study is carried out for the quantification of these parameters and the response obtained in the central region is validated with the analytical solutions available in the literature.

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