Scoping prediction of railway groundborne vibration in the presence of variable soils

This paper describes the development of a railway ground-borne noise and vibration prediction approach for environmental impact assessments. The software is called 'ScopeRail', and is capable of predicting in-door noise and vibration, Inside buildings close to high speed railway lines. The software is empirically based and can quickly predict vibration levels over large lengths of track. To validate the software, experimental data is collected on European high speed lines and combined with existing data sets from across several countries. Using this data, predicted results are benchmarked against an alternative model and it is found that ScopeRail may give elevated accuracy.