Trough railway bridge, Baulmes (VD)

The world's first Ultra High-Performance Fiber-Reinforced Concrete (UHPFRC) trough railway bridge was installed and put into service in August 2021 on the TRAVYS railway line between Yverdon and St-Croix.

Thanks to the high strength of UHPFRC of more than 180 MPa, the bridge deck is made entirely of UHPFRC with a thickness of 6 cm to 24 cm, allowing several project constraints to be met (e.g. small available space between the running surface and the gauge of the cantonal road below; limited access for transporting the deck on site).

The underpass consists of a deck including a metric track and two footbridges (total width 5.8 m, length 6.6 m), and two prefabricated reinforced concrete support benches which are placed on the existing masonry abutment walls. The prefabricated elements were installed with millimetre precision.

The passage of road traffic on the cantonal road was fully maintained during the works.

A technical paper entitled "Experimental investigation of a keying joint cast in UHPFRC between precast UHPFRC bridge elements" describing the full-scale laboratory experiment to validate the keying joint suitability for railway brifges which was specifically done for this project. This paper was published in  "Materials and Structures", the flagship publication of the International Union of Laboratories and Experts in Construction Materials, Systems and Structures. The paper can be viewed at the following address:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1617/s11527-022-01931-x

A second paper was published for the IABSE symposium in Prague in 2022 entitled "Short Span UHPFRC railway bridge in Switzerland - from design to implementation"