Considerations for High Speed Rail Bridge Design – A Review of China’s Progress

A review of China’s recent developments in high speed rail (HSR) can benefit the development of HSR bridge design standards in North America. In China, commercial operation of passenger trains up to 250 km/h (155 mph) began in 2007 on existing rail lines that serve mixed passenger and freight trains. After 2007, construction of commercial passenger dedicated lines (PDL’s) started since further upgrading of mixed-traffic rail lines for higher speeds was considered unpractical and uneconomical. China released its Code for Design of High Speed Railway in late 2009 for passenger train design speed between 250 km/h (155 mph) and 350 km/h (217 mph). The code document contains 22 chapters, including Alignment, Bridges and Culverts, Tunnels, Tracks, Stations, Traction, Power Supply, and more. Compared with conventional railways, HSR has stricter requirements on bridge structural stiffness to minimize deformations and avoid excessive vibrations or resonance due to train crossings at high speeds. Bridge design for HSR requires a good understanding of train-track-structure dynamic interactions, requirements for deflections, rotations, and natural frequencies of bridge spans, as well as continuous welded rail (CWR)-structure interactions. This paper provides an overview of the Chinese HSR bridge design standards and three research projects behind the development of the standards.