In past decade, railway infrastructure experienced significant expansion. All across the world, investments in railway infrastructure are present in order to assure greening of transportation. Significant industrialization and accordingly development of transportation infrastructure caused serious atmospheric pollutions and irretrievable degradation of living conditions. In order to stop this constantly raising pollution, most of current investments are focused on development of high speed railways as sustainable transportation way. Construction of such engineering structures requires special care during selection of applied materials due to presence of heavy dynamic loads and aggressive exposure conditions.
On market are present track systems specially designed for high speed railways, but application of inadequate materials caused insufficient durability of these structures. In order to improve existing solutions, scientists from University of Zagreb developed innovative concrete ballastless track prototype called ECOTRACK. In its nutshell, ECOTRACK is concrete based solution that incorporates waste materials obtained during mechanical recycling of waste tyres. Incorporation of named materials assures ECOTRACKs alignment with all relevant EU Directive in field of waste management on one side, and on the other improvement of toughness and post-cracking behaviour desirable for described ballastless track systems.

railways, recycled tyres, ballastless track, innovative materials