Operated by China Railway High-speed Company (CRH), the Wuhan–Guangzhou High-Speed Railway, also known as the Wuhan-Guangzhou Passenger Dedicated Line (hereinafter WGPDL), connects Wuhan city, Hubei, province to Guangzhou city, Guangdong province. It is the high-speed railways with the longest mileage completed at one time, the highest technical standards, the largest investment and the maximum operating speed as far in the world.. The line is part of the future 2100-km long Beijing-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway.

For realizing high requirements of speed, comfort and safety, it is required to have smooth and stable alignment, which depends on strict control of settlement deformation of infrastructure constructions. Design calculation is still unable to predict settlement deformation exactly and control track residual settlement and deformation effectively. Therefore, systematic analysis and prediction on the deformation of infrastructure structures should be made before the installation of ballastless track.

The topic of settlement observation and evaluation is one of major new technical difficulties to be faced during the construction of passenger dedicated lines. It has great significance in guaranteeing the construction quality of ballastless track of passenger dedicated lines that researching on the methods of settlement deformation observation and evaluation for high-speed railways, establishing a scientific system of settlement deformation observation, analysis and evaluation, and then analyzing the data of settlement deformation observation in areas of subgrade, bridge and culvert, tunnel, transition section before the installation of ballastless track in order to judge whether infrastructure constructions can satisfy the installation conditions of ballastless track.

With lots of research from IRSM, reasonable methods applicable for settlement deformation prediction of high-speed railways have beendetermined, and “Integrated System of Settlement Observation Data Management, Analysis and Prediction for WGPDL” has been developed and indexes and judging standards as well as the management mode and operational mechanism of settlement deformation analysis and evaluation of passenger dedicated lines have been discussed, all these provide technical guarantee for successful development of WGPDL settlement deformation observation, analysis and evaluation.

According to statistics results, the successful application of the research results for the whole project Wuhan-Guangzhou passenger line can save investment of 200 million yuan, and has created enormous economic benefits.

These results researched by IRSM will continue to be applied on some related construction between the Shijiazhuang-Wuhan passenger dedicated lines.

‘We believe such kind of technique will have a far-reaching impact on the China’s High-Speed Railway construction in the future!’ said of Prof. CHEN Shanxiong, the chief scientist of the project.