What is a Steel Rail System?

What is a Steel Rail System?

A steel rail system is a comprehensive track structure for trains, featuring parallel steel rails fixed to sleepers (ties) on ballast, designed to guide vehicles, bear immense weight, and provide a smooth, durable surface for transport. It's composed of specialized high-carbon steel rails, sleepers, clips, fasteners, and ballast, forming the backbone for railways, mining, and port operations.

Key Components of a Steel Rail System

• Steel Rails: The main guiding and load-bearing surface, shaped like an I-beam (or "工" in Chinese) for strength, made from high-quality steel alloys for durability.

• Sleepers (Ties): Wooden, concrete, or steel beams beneath the rails that hold them at the correct distance and transfer loads to the ballast.

• Ballast: Crushed stone beneath sleepers that provides drainage, distributes weight, and keeps tracks stable.

• Fastenings: Components like rail clips, spikes, and bolts that secure the rails to the sleepers.

• Turnouts: Special track sections allowing trains to switch tracks.

What is a steel rail?

A steel rail is a specially shaped, heavy steel bar forming the continuous track for trains, guiding wheels, bearing immense loads, and providing a smooth surface, typically with a profile like an asymmetric I-beam (head, web, foot) for direct mounting on sleepers (ties), made from high-carbon steel for strength, hardness, and wear resistance in railway systems.

Steel rail can be divided into three basic types based on the steel rails weight. They are light rails, heavy rails and crane rails.

• Light rail is supported for the light-weight trend tramcar, light-rail train and the monorail train. Due to the limited busload and simple infrastructure, heavy rails are not suited for the ultimate system. Because the heavy steel rails will increase the construction budget. That is the essential difference between light rail and heavy rails.

• Heavy rails are most common in our daily life. The railway track refers to the heavy rails in a large degree. The heavy rail refers to the weight is more than 60kg per meter. The common heavy rail size is 5okg rail, 60kg rail and the 75kg rail. The heavy rail has a bigger fracture surface than the light rails, so the heavy rails can bear much more pressure. GNEE RAIL supports various heavy rails like 60kg rails, 75kg rails. Besides, our products are compliant with the GB2585-2007.

• Crane rails : The other kind of heavy rail is the crane rail. QU70 rail and QU80 rail are the common crane rails size. Our crane rails up to the YB/T5055-93 standard.

As a professional rail fastener supplier, GNEE RAILcan provide different standard steel rail such as American, BS, UIC, DIN, JIS, Australian and South Africa which used in railway lines, cranes and coal mining.

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