Page 233 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 5

Stabilization techniques in railway track maintenance

You can reach rigidities of the platform depending on the amount and the type of cement used
so that you get an immediate commissioning. Even if it were essential to achieve tremendous
rigidity in the first hours of operation, also setting accelerators may be used.

In the works in which by the nature of the soil, you must use lime as conglomerate,
commissioning can be immediate since lime acts quickly transforming the soil, while the
strength gain can be increased with the passage of time producing a cementing of this soil,
slow but inexorably.

The same occurs in relation to the maintenance of service paths, although these are not
critical for the correct operation of the track or have restrictions as demanding like this
available for repair periods. If the goal is to build so that maintenance is cheap and durable,
it is clear that this is a field in which we have to take in account without any doubt with
stabilized materials, without having to reach the employment of more expensive materials
such as concrete or asphalt mixtures.

2. The technique of in‐situ recycling ‐ stabilizing

The technique is very simple and it is running since antiquity, although currently with media
that make the cost‐effectiveness and speed, very low.
It mainly consists of mixing the existing soils, whatever the quality they are, with the right
binder in each case and the amount that is prescribed to achieve a certain result, with very few
restrictions that will be described later.
This way or repairing demands some previous work more than traditional solutions replacing
material by a harder one, but the results are well worth. Rigidities reached can be 10 times
higher than the existing soil, or bigger depending on the circumstances, and therefore durability
may also be much greater.
The binders used are usually Lime and Portland Cement, that are sufficiently known in the

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 231