Modern railway suffers from the persistent rolling contact fatigue damage, which requires frequent maintenance on rail, disrupting the rail traffic, and in the worst-case scenario leading to serious accidents. To maintain the rails and safeguard the railway traffic effectively and efficiently, a better understanding of rail steels with respect to their mechanical properties and elasto-plastic behaviours is desirable for the railway infrastructure managers to optimally select from available rail materials and for manufacturers to design and make better rail materials.

So far, the selection of rail steel materials for a certain loading condition is done by trial and error. Also, design of rail materials that have better anti- rolling contact fatigue performance requires tools that can better quantify ratcheting - the accumulated plastic deformation under wheel-rail rolling contact. This project focusses on the development of:

- Simple axial tests that can be used for industrial selection of rail material applications under specific loading conditions. Improper selection of rail materials can reduce rail service life from more than 25 years to less than 10 years.

- Models of rail materials that can be calibrated with the tests and can be further used to quantify ratcheting of the rail surface with more advanced numerical models. Such models can be used for predicting the rolling contact fatigue performance of rail materials and thus support rail material design.