Lateral movements of the ballasted railway track especially in the continuous welded rail (CWR) occur in sharp curves because of high lateral forces. Several strategies have been proposed to increase the track lateral resistance which most of them related to track curves with small radii. In this paper, track lateral supports as a new method have been utilized and a series of field tests have been conducted by using the Single Tie Push Tests (STPT) and Multi Tie Push Tests (MTPT) and their results are compared with the numerical modeling. The results of numerical modeling and field tests show that the track lateral resistance significantly increases in the railway with lateral supports, so that the lateral displacements of track are as a bilinear form.

Transportation development is one of the important goals of countries which is associated with economic and social development. Therefore, expanding the transportation infrastructure and construction has always been a key issue for managers in developed and developing countries. Due to the high costs of infrastructure projects in the transportation industry, especially railways as the safest and the most cost-effective mode of transportation, the financial resources must be managed with great sensitivity and precision. In current economic conditions, various methods have been proposed for decision-making in transportation infrastructure projects and prioritization of railway reconstruction projects. In this research, different decision models to prioritize transportation infrastructure projects are reviewed and according to the selected AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) model, railway reconstruction projects in Iranian railway networks are prioritized. In this regard, first, reconstruction projects have been reviewed from a technical and economic point of view, and then prioritization has been done according to the weight of effective criteria in the projects. In this study, important criteria for prioritization in terms of importance are considered as: Cost of Reconstruction, Train Speed Restriction, Allowable Speed, Railway Capacity, Traffic, Time, and Railway Track Quality. The effect of cost of reconstruction criterion is about 12 times greater than the time criterion and the output of the model showed that Jalalabad-Golezard block is the first priority for reconstruction in the area of Kerman and Southeastern in Iranian Railways.