干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

One of the main problems of railway lines in sandy-dry areas is the sands flowing into the railway lines. This causes serious impact on the productivity and effectiveness of the railways and disturbs trains running safety. Compatibility of railways with this situation is very hard, imposing a dramatic sum of maintenance costs on railway industries. This research deals with the approaches and solutions for the maintenance of railways in these conditions and introduces an effective maintenance method based on long-term maintenance experiences in Iranian railway industries. In this paper, the current and most practical methods in confronting this phenomena including planting (artificial forest), constructing channels vertical to the wind direction, creating physical barriers vertical to the wind direction, stabilising sand areas with oil products, and constructing various water ways in the track infrastructures are discussed. Taking into consideration almost a decade of experience by Iranians of maintenance of railway in sandy-dry areas, the aforementioned methods are evaluated and the most practical approaches are introduced.