Evaluation of the Strength of Railway Ballast Using Point Load Test for Various Size Fractions and Particle Shapes

The ballast layer is one of the most important components of the railway track superstructure in which angular aggregates of high strength rocks are used. Ballast degradation is one of the main sources of railway problems in which the ballast aggregates are gradually degraded due to the abrasion of the sharp corners of the angular particles and splitting each individual particle into two or several small pieces under loading. In this paper, the effects of rock type, aggregate size and particle shape on the strength of the single ballast particles are investigated. For this purpose, point load test is carried out on ballast aggregates of four rock types including basalt, marl, dolomite and trachyte. According to the obtained results, as the size of the aggregates increases, the point load strength index decreases. The influence of size on the strength is more noticeable for ballasts obtained from higher strength rocks. It is also found that the shape of ballast particles has no major effect on its strength. Furthermore, our findings show that the failure pattern for ballasts of higher strength is so that each particle commonly splits into three pieces; while the dominant failure pattern for ballast particles with less strength is breaking the particle into two pieces.