Analysis of Existing Steel Railway Bridges

Railway bridges represent the significant parts of the railways due to their key and strategy position in transportation infrastructure. During the years of exploitation, many degradation processes and external influences attack the bridge structures. Due to those effects their durability and reliability is decreasing depending on time. On the other hand, the traffic load remains almost the same or even higher than in the past. But, bridges should not to become the limiting component of communication capacity and traffic reliability passage. In the period of 2013-14 the collective of the Department of structures and bridges has worked up the Guideline “Determination of load-carrying capacities of railway bridges” [1]. The Guideline was prepared for Slovak Railways and it was also published in the Czech Republic as the methodology instruction [2]. Therefore, the paper describes general concept and basic assumptions for evaluations of existing railway bridges and determining their load-carrying capacities based on the principles of Eurocodes.