Development of a new high-speed train load model for dynamic calculation of railway bridges

Dynamic calculations of train crossing ofrailway bridges must be carried out in Eu-rope in accordance with currentvalid standards for both new and existing bridges.The high-speed load model(HSLM)trains to be used aredefined in the Eurocode, denoted as HSLM-A1 to -A10. In the near past, the results gained from these dy-namic calculations of train crossing have shown, that the current validHSLM model trains do not cover the bridge vibrationresponselevelfor certain real operating trains. It turned out that the application of the HSLM-A trainsmight lead to an unsafe design of new railway bridges and destabilization of the ballast layer may occur, leading to safety critical track position defects and eventually to train derail-ments.Hence, in2019 theconsortium TU Darmstadt, KU Leuven, Austrian Institute of Technology and REVOTEC was commissioned by the German Federal Railway Authority to develop a completely new European high-speed train load model for dynamic calculations of railway bridgesthat should account for almost all current running operating trains in the European railway network. The project ended in June 2023and this paper presents the steps carried out to develop the high-speed train load model, denoted as HSLM-C,and the results of validationcalculations consider-ing more than 300 existing railway bridgesof different construction type.