| Abstract | With the ongoing development of rail and wheel metallurgies, steels of greater hardness are now available for consideration at transit and freight railroads alike. Concerns are nearly always raised about the expected impact on the opposing component. That is, if the hardness of the wheels or rail is increased, might that cause problems with the opposing rail or wheels? In a companion paper [1], the authors explore the effect of relative hardness on wear of rails and wheels. An international survey developed for that paper to collect perspectives on how relative hardness affects wear also revealed perspectives related to rolling contact fatigue and plastic flow. Topics such as the Magic Wear Rate and role of rail grinding also arose. This paper explores those topics using fundamental principles of contact mechanics, interfacial properties, stress and strain analysis, and material performance to explain the consequences of harder wheel and/or rail steels on system performance, particularly with respect to RCF and plastic flow. |
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