Preventive Maintenance of Railway Tracks: Ballast Performance Anticipation in the Cameroon Railway

The aim of the present research study is to produce a methodology that provides an understanding of the mechanical behaviour of ballast and its degradation in order to reflect field performance of different ballast materials used by CAMRAIL in their railway network, and to better anticipate an efficient planning of the railway track maintenance. Based on existed literature, on collected data of different railway sections, and on the finite element analysis of the vehicle-track mechanical interaction, a preventive ballast cleaning and renewal strategy, formulated through ballast deterioration indexes is proposed. Comparing to the ongoing dayto- day maintenance strategy the proposed functionality-based preventive maintenance offers the following advantages: security and comfort of users; forecasting of ballast corrective measures; planned maintenance actions; higher functional and exploitation level of the track and availability of needed materials and mechanisms. The administration of CAMRAIL has promised to extend further the findings of this work in other to fully optimized the track maintenance cost in each railway section.