- It Rail-ly does

the rail ends and roughly a third are fatigue related and the last third for other or unknown/unclassified reasons.

If you use longer rails you minimise a significant portion of observed failures of rail ends. It must be noted that these networks already use long length rails.

If I went back 30 years, we would see the rail ends slice of the pie be larger again in both proportion and sadly number of failures too.

Rail joints require maintenance

Now aside from the failure risk, there is also the added cost of maintaining rail joints. Fishplates have an obvious cost of bolt tightening and lubrication, but dipped joints (both fishplate and welded joints) require intervention to correct alignment and restore smooth running which all adds maintenance costs too. If a joint isn't there - it doesn't require inspecting and maintaining!

Rail joints degrade both track and train

The physical joint between rails results in discontinuous properties across the length of the joint. With a fishplate there is an obvious impact noise and force as the wheel load transfers from one rail to the next which affects both ballast life and vehicle components too.

With welded joints the differences are more subtle but dipped or cupped welded joints increase dynamic track and train forces in the same way accelerating the degradation of the entire track and train system. Again if a joint is avoided then the source of the discontinuity is no longer there and the system degradation is slowed.

So size DOES matter!

Hopefully it is clear that size does indeed matter - at least for rails, and why rail lengths have increased over time. The challenge is of course producing and handling these rail lengths, but perhaps those are articles for another day.

Daniel is currently seeking new challenges in the rail / engineering / marketing areas - get in touch through Freight Tracks if you think he can bring something to your team.