Title Hydrology, hydraulics and design for the culverts for the Alice Springs - Darwin railway project
Author Weeks, B
Dawson, T
Niall, R
Conference CORE 2004 New Horizons for Rail Conference on Railway Engineering Darwin Northern Territory Australia 20 23 June 2004
Publication Date 2004
Location Server
ARRB library
Abstract There were complex issues involved in the design of the culverts for the Alice Springs–Darwin railway project, and the design team developed innovative procedures for all aspects of the process. Flood frequency analysis is a difficult problem for the more remote regions of the Northern Territory. As part of the design, new regional flood frequency procedures have been developed. These new procedures, which provide a means for design flood estimation over a large area of the Northern Territory, can update previously adopted procedures. The daunting task of performing the hydraulic design for numerous culvert locations inspired the development of a new Excel-based hydraulic analysis technique. This automatically selected the optimum pipe sizes and numbers for carrying the predicted 50 year ARI flows within the constraints of available driving head and limits on exit velocity to control erosion. Structurally, culvert barrels were spiral wound, corrugated thin metal pipes, up to 2.4 m in diameter. They were spun on site from rolls of flat plate and embedded in a cement-soil embankment which provides a stable environment in wet conditions, enabling the use of larger pipes, and simplifying construction.
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CORE 2004_Weeks
Subjects Culvert
Design
Rail transport