Assessment of the wheel-rail interaction behaviors of the embedded rail system for the runnability analysis of Messina Bridge

The Messina Bridge is a highly innovative bridge design for the world's longest span (3300m) to link Sicily with mainland Italy. The design is a suspension bridge composed of four main cables, 399m tall steel towers and a steel triple box girder, two for road traffic and one for a double track railway. The adopted track system is an Embedded Rail System (ERS). In order to develop and verify the effectiveness of the ERS solution application for the railway deck, a series of activities were planned and carried out. After an early laboratory tests, a long-term field test under operational condition was performed, on the railway bridge on Arno River, near Pisa railway station, where in 2004 the same ERS of the Messina bridge was installed. After a long period of operation, a measurement campaign was carried out to check the behavior of the installed ERS. In parallel, a FEM model of the instrumented span was setup considering beam elements, to reproduce the main truss members of the bridge and a continuous visco-elastic bed for the elastomeric layer of the ERS. The simulation of the train transit was conducted by means of ADTreS software. The comparison between measured and simulated displacement and acceleration validates the ERS model so that it can be used for future analyses of the full model of the Messina Bridge.