Funding:

• • Department of Transportation/Federal Railroad Administration 

  • Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway (in-kind)

Collaborators:

• • Prof. Piervincenzo Rizzo, University of Pittsburgh

  • Volpe National Transportation Center

Purpose:

To enable testing of rail maintenance technologies on a realistic railroad track under controlled laboratory settings. 

Synopsis:

UCSD has the only Rail Defect Farm in the West Coast of the U.S. This Class I track was constructed by Sopac Rail Inc. under FRA sponsorship with in-kind donation of materials by BNSF. The Rail Defect Farm is located at UCSD’s Camp Elliott Field Station Laboratory, 9 miles away from the main UCSD campus. The Camp Elliott Station also hosts the NSF NEES Outdoor Shake Table facility, the Outdoor Soil Pit, and the Blast Simulator facility (http://nees.ucsd.edu/about/).

The  Defect Farm features 250 feet of 136-lb rail with a number of natural and artificial defects including Detail Fractures, Transverse Fissures, other Rolling Contact Fatigue defects, Vertical and Horizontal Split Heads, among others. The track includes a tangent portion (~125-ft in length) and an 8-deg curved portion (~125-ft in length). The Rail Defect Farm is a unique facility being used primarily for UCSD R&D projects on rail maintenance. The facility is also available for third-party testing on a recharge basis.