Approaches for Protecting Railway Tracks against Quicksands Invasion Crisis and Providing an Optimal Solution for Crisis Management

Nowadays, transportation plays a major role in the political, economic, and social development processes. In this regard, railway industry is of higher priority over other transportation types due to various features including less fuel consumption, reduced environmental pollution, higher safety, less land use, and more passenger and commodity transfer rate. Therefore, focusing on its improvement and necessity of preventing the crises resulted from threatening grounds are among the inevitable requirements in this area [1, 2]. Since penetration of quicksands into railway tracks results in sand deposition on the tracks, track obstruction, train derailment, track flexibility damage, failure of railway fleet and electrical signs, and in fact leads to crisis, the present study is aimed to investigate the traditional and modern methods as well as an innovative method for reducing the penetration of sands into the tracks and reducing their accumulation on railway tracks. In addition to the currently existing solutions, the present study is focused on an approach for creating sand passage channels in embankments, modifying the hump-shaped geometrical form of the track sleepers, and providing an optimal channel design for easy movement of sands and leaving the sand passage path open for quick movement of the sands from the railway track area.