Fatigue assessment of riveted railway bridges

The purpose of this paper is to present fatigue-related results obtained from finite element analyses of a typical riveted railway bridge. The first part of the paper deals with past case studies related to the fatigue assessment of various riveted railway bridges. The second part of the paper presents the results obtained from the finite element analyses of the wrought-iron bridge under typical present-day and assumed historical train loadings. These results are in the form of fatigue damage and associated remaining life estimates of the riveted connections. By fatigue-ranking the connections on an S-N basis and under different detail classifications, the most fatigue-critical connections are identified as being the inner stringer-to-cross-girder connections assuming full rotational connection fixity. Dynamic amplification is shown to affect remaining fatigue life estimates considerably