Railway Axle Design: To be Based on Fatigue Initiation or Crack Propagation?

Design and standardization of railway axles from the mechanical-strength point of view is discussed and a brief state-of-the-art survey is given. Traditional fatigue design with the ‘safe-life’ approach and a design with the more recent crack-propagation/defect-tolerance approach are described and compared. Axles of a standard freight wheelset (22.5 tonne axle...