Railway ground vibration and mitigation measures: benchmarking of best practices

Vibration and noise aspects play a relevant role in the lifetime and comfort of urban areas and their residents. Among the different sources, the one coming from the rail transit system will play a central concern in the following years due to its sustainability. Ground-borne vibration and noise assessment as well as techniques to mitigate them become key elements of the environmental impact and the global enlargement planned for the railway industry. This paper aims to describe and compare the different mitigation systems existing and reported in literature through a comprehensive state of the art analysis providing the performance of each measure. First, an introduction to the ground-borne vibration and noise generated from the wheel-rail contact and its propagation through the transmission path is presented. Then, the impact and the different ways of evaluating and assessing these effects are presented, and the insertion loss indicator is introduced. Next, the different mitigation measures at different levels (vehicle, track, transmission path and receiver) are discussed by describing their possible application and their efficiency in terms of insertion loss. Finally, a summary with inputs of how it is possible to address the future of mitigation systems is reported.