A SIMPLE way to prevent train crashes caused by buckled rails has been developed by engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The technique, developed by Richard Weaver and Vesna Damljanovic, gives an accurate measure of the stress in a rail simply by forcing it to vibrate and measuring the size of the vibrations.
Buckled rails are a significant cause of serious train crashes. In the US there were 44 accidents caused by buckled rails in 2001. And in January this year a buckled rail is thought to have caused a train crash near Sydney, Australia, in which nine…
