CHARACTERIZATION OF THE ACOUSTIC EMISSION OF RAILWAY NOISE, APPLYING THE CNOSSOS-EU METHOD, BY SOME SPANISH RAILWAY MANAGERS

The adoption of the CNOSSOS-EU as the official method to calculating environmental noise has allowed some railway managers to invest efforts in the acoustic characterization of vehicles and railway infrastructures. This paper presents results of some of projects with this aim, carried out by: ADIF AV (National Administrator of Railway Infrastructures of Spain), ETS (Administrator of Railway Infrastructures of the Basque Autonomous Community) and CTB (Administrator of Railway Infrastructures of Bilbao Metro). In these projects, railway noise emission databases have been defined that contain the input values for the CNOSSOS-EU parameters for the optimal characterization of trains and infrastructures. The characterization is based on the analysis of in-service train passbys campaigns. ADIF AV has defined a database of 28 types of trains and 6 types of infrastructure, through the analysis of 600 passbys measured at 7 locations. The ETS database contains 4 types of trains and 4 infrastructures (78 measured passbys) and CTB defines 3 types of trains and 1 infrastructure (52 passbys). The paper presents some of the decisions taken by each institution to better represent the actual measured emissions.