Abstract. A railway track system is comprised of several components such as rail,
sleeper and ballast. Ballast is the weakest component in the track system and it is
subjected to latent dynamic shifting. Constant and continuous loads lead to wear and
breaking up of the ballast, thus, diminish the quality of track geometry. This causes
unaccounted periodical tamping of track bed. A holistic solution to slow down this
process is by installing rubber sleeper pads. Numerical investigation is performed using
the general-purpose finite element software ABAQUS for the track system with varying
rubber pad thickness and locality. The elastic properties of rubber are expected to
lengthen the bending line of the rails and reduce the direct dynamic load on the ballast.
Four separate models of the same load, sleeper and rail but with different rubber pad
thicknesses is modelled using the finite element software ABAQUS to investigate the
effect of the variation of rubber pad thickness in terms of the static stress distribution of
the rail-sleeper. Spring supports are used at the bottom of the sleeper to represent the
elastic stiffness of ballast bed and subgrade. The results indicate a reduction of sleeper
stress along the depth of the cross-section of the concrete sleeper against increased
thickness of rubber sleeper pad. Sleeper pad with 10mm exhibit a stress value of
2737kPa, whereas a stress reduction of approximately 10% and 17% was obtained if a
15mm and 20mm sleeper pad was used respectively. Nevertheless, the author
concluded that the economics of using rubber sleeper pads is in the range between 22mm
to 25mm. The suggested range was derived from the optimizing the behaviour of stress
for both the concrete sleeper and rubber sleeper pads. The sleeper pads have the
tendency to minimise excessive stress from developing within naked concrete sleepers
