IF articles

Summary - The derailment of a railway vehicle may be attributed to different causes and may occur through the overturning of a vehicle, the lateral displacement of a track, wheel climb, or gauge widening/rail rollover. In terms of its consequences, it is included amongst railway incidents that are characterized by the increased severity of their impacts, while its numerous potential causes necessitate strict investigational procedures. A crucial step of these procedures is the ‘derailment verification’. This scientific area of railway engineering remains an ‘open’ field of research. This work, a) provides analytical and empirical expressions that are used for derailment verification, b) evaluates qualitatively the parameters that affect the derailment phenomenon, and c) applies the aforementioned expressions to a specific case study.