Residual service life of existing railway bridges

The residual service life of existing railway bridges is analyzed and assessed in this paper. Fa- tigue and damage assessment are considered to be the most critical topic issues in order to estimate the resid- ual life of these types of structures. In fact, with the aging of existing steel bridges and the accumulated stress cycles under traffic loads, assessment of remaining fatigue life for continuing service has become more im- portant than ever, especially for decisions on structure replacement, or retrofit interventions. Experience from engineering practice indicates that fatigue analysis based on code provisions often underestimates the remain- ing fatigue life of existing bridges due to overestimating live load stress ranges, and, at the same time, under- estimating the stress history. In order to bridge the gap between common engineering practice assessment of existing bridges and code provisions, this analysis has been performed along with traffic prevision.