Identification, modelling and reduction potential of railway noise sources: a critical survey

Environmental requirements for railway operations will become tighter in the future. In particular, annoyance due to railway noise has to be taken carefully into account in the expansion of freight traffic as well as in new high speed line projects. Reduction of noise at source can be more attractive than the use of noise barriers but this requires a thorough understanding of the source mechanisms. This paper presents a critical survey of the identification and modelling of railway noise sources and summarizes the current knowledge of the physical source phenomena (mainly rolling and aerodynamic sources) as well as the potential for noise reduction. Future research perspectives are also given. These concern, in particular, improvements to source modelling, especially for aerodynamic noise, investigation of other sources and development of more advanced models for predicting railway noise in the environment. These should include a better description of the sources, obtained from modelling.