Working with noise production ceilings for railway traffic
Invited paper
ProRail
Wednesday 3 june, 2015, 15:40 - 16:00
0.1 London (90)
Abstract:
ProRail is the Dutch rail infra manager. ProRail maintains the rail
infrastructure and manages the capacity of the railways for over thirty-five
different railway operators. Since 1st of July 2012 ProRail has the legal
duty to comply with the noise production ceilings (NPC’s) along the railway
tracks. In this paper the experiences of the first two years are presented.
First it is explained how the introduction of NPC’s has influenced the daily
business of ProRail:
- How do the NPC’s influence rail infrastructure maintenance?
- How do the NPC’s influence projects on the rail infrastructure?
- How do the NPC’s influence capacity management?
Second examples are described how the NPC’s have influenced the actual noise
situation along the railway infrastructure:
- Additional source measures have been applied on the railway tracks
- Freight trains have been banned from certain tracks and rerouted
- Freight trains have been driving at reduced speeds
- More silent passenger trains have been used on certain tracks
- Freight wagons have been retrofitted with alternative brake blocks