Railway Track Design online Calculator

Railway engineering is a significant branch of transportation engineering, Railway transportation is an on-land transportation system with air ways and sea ways as other parallel off-land transportation means. Railway transportation share a healthy burden of transportation of a community or country, carrying large bulky luggage from one end to heavy duty tanks, military equipment at the other. 

Railway Track Design Calculator and Excel Sheet for civil engineers

Railway track has few components named as formation, sleepers, rails, ballast and fixtures. Of course they are easy to understand but will not be covered in this post. 

Mostly one very simple part of railway track design includes the calculation of no. of rails, no of sleepers and quantity of the ballast for specific track having fixed dimensions of track length, sleeper depth, width and height.

In this post I will share with you a very common and simple example on how to calculate these basic quantities from the given information about the railway track.

Design of railway track

This is the example that i have followed in developing this calculator.
The information that we need or the inputs we need are given as under;
Sleeper Dimensions = 10' x 10" x 6"
Length of rail = 60 ft.
Sleeper Density = n + 3
Track Length = 20 km
Sleeper Packing = 100%
Joint spacing = 1"
and we need to calculate the following information;
No. Of sleepers = ?
No. Of Rails = ?
Quantum of Ballast = ?
The formulas and solution of this problem is shown in the following diagram along with formulas;

Formula and variables used in design of railway track

Calculation of Railway Track Design

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Enter the Sleeper Dimensions
a:		(ft)
d:		(in)
e:		(in)
Enter the Ballast Dimensions
b:		(ft)
c:		(ft)
Enter the Track Specifications
Rail Length (Lr):		(ft)
Track Length (Lt):		(ft)
Joint Spacing b/w rails (S):		(in)
Results
No. Of Rails on one side (Nr):		(nos)
No. Of Rails on Both side (TNR):		(nos)
No. Of Sleepers (Ns):		(nos)
Quantity of Ballast:		(Cubic Feet - CFT)

How to use this calculator

Simply input the Sleeper Dimension, Ballast Dimension and Track specification as defined in the above figure. As an example you can also input the sample example data for testing in the specific fields.

Then just click the Calculate button and there you got the results.

Excel Sheet for Railway Track Design

If you find any difficulty in using this calculator or you are not sure enough about its results you can check the formulas and mechanism used there in by downloading the excel sheet for this sample problem and calculator

Download Excel Sheet

For Editor's Desk

In this post I have assumed that you know the basic terminologies involved in the railway engineering. But don't worry you will see a very healthy dictionary of railway engineering very soon on iamcivilengineer.com so stay tuned. Keep on sharing the good work, it will be helpful for you buddies and civil engineers. 

Disclaimer

The use of above included calculator is only for education and testing purpose, the consequences of the use of this calculator will not be the responsibility of iamcivilengineer.com. so use it on your own risk.