ABSTRACT
The response of railway track under various environments may be linear or nonlinear. Railway track must be designed and maintained to survive extreme environments and service conditions. Therefore, structural engineers are confronted with a great challenge of analysing the stochastic and nonlinear response the track structure. The theoretical model of the rail as a beam on continuous elastic foundation introduced by Timoshenko provided a basis for the track design procedure and stress analysis of the railroad track components. The field tests revealed that the relation between the vertical rail deflections and the wheel load under various environments may be linear or nonlinear. The nonlinearity is attributed mainly to the play between the rails, the sleepers and the ballast and to the bending of sleepers while they take full bearing. The linear and nonlinear solutions are compared. These nonlinearities can be attributed mainly to play between the sleepers and ballast and to the bending of sleepers while they take full bearing.
