This paper presents a method to estimate the deflection in ballasted railway tracks and compares the results with field measurements, performed by other researchers. The influence of different variables on deflection estimation such as loading, gauge, rails, sleepers, layers’ thickness and resilient modulus was parameterized through 768 simulations of representative layered structures using the finite-element software ABAQUS. It is not about conventional numerical simulations, but simulations implementing a theoretical-empirical model developed in Brazil, with Brazilian soils from different regions, by Guimarães (2009) in your Ph.D thesis. For this implementation, an internal subroutine named UMAT, from ABAQUS, was developed in Fortran. With the deflections results from each simulated track, a matrix with 768x7 elements was formed and solved with a MATLAB program. As a result, an equation was defined to estimate deflections of real railway tracks similar to those simulated. Comparisons among the numerical simulation results and field tests show that the proposed method can be applied to predict vertical displacement of railway tracks.

railway, tracks, ABAQUS, UMAT, deflections