Evaluation of seismic behaviour of railway bridges considering track-bridge interaction

Railway bridges have historically performed well in the previous earthquakes. Although this performance has qualitatively been studied in some references such as AREMA code, no quantitative criteria has been proposed for it. Thus, this study aims to present quantitative criteria for railway bridge performance under seismic loads. In the paper, seismic behaviour of railway bridges, with and without track-bridge interaction (TBI), is calculated through finite element modeling. Pushover and incremental dynamic analyses, are utilized to assess the proposed method, considering fourteen records of the past earthquakes. The results clearly show superior performance of the proposed model with track system, in which the deck displacement, base shear, and plastic rotation decrease by 70%-90%, 20%-83%, and 85%-100%, respectively. Finally, two equations are proposed to calculate deck displacement and base shear of railway bridges without performing track-bridge interaction (TBI) by Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) of the applied record approximately.