Analysis of the Effectiveness of Determining the Horizontal Curvature of a Track Axis Using a Moving Chord

The paper addresses the issue of determining the horizontal curvature of a railway track, noting that it is most often done indirectly – on the basis of measured sags from a chord stretched along the track. Further use of this method would not be justified if there were a direct method for determining the curvature. Therefore, the assumptions of the method for deter-mining the horizontal curvature from “Archives of Civil Engineering”, iss. 4/2020, are presented. This method is based on changes in the slope angles of the moving chord in the Cartesian coordinate system. Two important details are examined: the influence of the length of the chord on the obtained values of curvature and the possibility of determining the location of border points between particular geometrical elements. The analysed variants resulted from the type of transition curves used. It has been found that the length of the chord does not play a significant role in determining the curvature and does not limit the application of this method. At the same time, attention is drawn to the precision of determining the nature of the curvature and its compliance with the theoretical course on transition curves. The analysis shows that, in the moving chord method, it is possible to determine the location of the border points between the individual geometrical elements, but the required chord length must be adapted to the type of transition curve. Keywords: railway, horizontal curvature, moving chord, analysis methodology