Concepts for reusing end‐of‐life railway rails for steel and steel‐concrete composite columns

Abstract Railway rails are generally ground and re‐shaped several times before they are disposed of because of too much material removal. In Switzerland alone, around 50'000 tons of end‐of‐life rails are melted every year. Instead of disposing of these rails or using them for producing recycling steel, they could be considered for reuse or remanufacturing in the sense of circular engineering. This contribution explores the possibilities of remanufacturing end‐of‐life railway rails into structural components. More specifically, it focuses on steel columns composed of one or several rails welded together and steel‐concrete composite columns with embedded rails. Bespoke novel structural solutions are compared in terms of dimensions and simplified environmental impact estimations to more conventional column systems with similar cross‐section resistances. This study illustrates that the proposed column solutions have a strong structural potential due to the high‐strength rail materials and a reduced environmental impact thanks to reusing end‐of‐life components. In addition, the influence of initial imperfections of reclaimed rails and eccentricities due to the rail geometry on the column buckling behavior is studied for selected solutions by finite element simulations.