There is no common position on the limiting speed up to which it is justified to apply the track floating in the stone aggregate ballast, i.e. the exceeding of which assumes the application of track on a solid base. Different railway administrations, as a rule, have formed their positions in practice. The attempts to apply the track with ballast in the field of high speeds and high traffic and axle loads, resulted in high maintenance costs and problems with organization of maintenance in decreasing available time intervals. The strongest argument for application of track on the solid base that has been pointed out are the negligible track maintenance costs during the projected long service life. The paper presents the experiences ahievedsof...