Influence of executive imperfections of railway steel bridges construction on operational capacity and fatigue capacity

In recent years, in our country are modernized and rebuilt several sections of railway lines, mainly main lines. The greater part is adapted to increased speeds. However, such an adaptation involve the reconstruction or construction of new bridges including steel ones. The paper concerns the executive imperfections of constructions of steel bridges which in recent years have been built in the modernized main railway lines. These imperfections consist of, among others, the geometric imperfections from the assumed construction project. This also applies to defects in welds of various types that occur in critical elements of bridge structure. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the influence of imperfections on the load carrying capacity and fatigue of these structures. Author showed that the observed imperfections have a significant impact on the fatigue life - especially for weld defects, in the case of load carrying capacity their importance is much smaller. These analyses are performed by using the theoretical methods developed in previous reports. In the analysis new standards for the design of steel structures from Eurocodes group were used.