ABSTRACT
This study presents an approach to estimate the remaining fatigue life of railway bridges using the fatigue load model and its calibration with the data from a Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) System. The basement of the model is an assumption that damage caused to the infrastructure by each train passage equals the damage of the most damaging train of the traffic at the site. The calibration of the model is performed using the measurements of strains on rails of the Sokna bridge (Dovreline), Norway. The idea of calibration is to guarantee that the load model induces the same fatigue damage as actual traffic. To simplify and unify the analysis influence lines (IL) approach, the standard method for predicting the stress histories of railway bridges, is used in the load model. Correction factors for calibration the model estimations are obtained for the fifteen most common IL for five main groups of trains.
