Sleepers Spacing Analysis in Railway Track Infrastructure

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Sleeper spacing is also important for the CWR track stability reason, this aspect was not taken into consideration in this study. Please revise and include this aspect in your research.

Author Response

Thank you for your commnets,

Please find attached the response to the comments

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

1）In the abstract, it is desirable to see the current issues in previous research. The authors only indicate the importance to analyse the sleeper spacing, but do not indicate if this work has been done previously. It is recommended to include one sentence to point out this as one of the motivations of this work.

2) Please remove section 0, as it is an instruction in the template.

3) In the first paragraph, it is recommended to indicate that poor quality of track may lead to a decrease in passenger comfortability, and safety [1] and the deterioration of the vehicle-overhead system interaction performance [2].

[1] Vehicle–Track Coupled Dynamics, Springer Singapore, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9283-3.

[2]  A spatial coupling model to study dynamic performance of pantograph-catenary with vehicle-track excitation, Mech. Syst. Signal Process. 151 (2021) 107336. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymssp.2020.107336.

4) A limitation of this work is that a spatial model of vehicle-track is not presented as [1-2]. Please discuss the reasonability of this simplification.

5) The discussion and analysis are quite detailed and informative. The reviewer only has one concern over the validation of the numerical model. The validation of the numerical model is the priority before doing a parametric analysis. Please comment on this issue.

6) Figure 9’ format needs to be improved.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments

Please find attached the response to your comments

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

1- the whole text needs English language 

Author Response

Thank you for this comment. Authors are not native speakers. However, now the whole manuscript has been revised by a native speaker. We hope that now the article reaches the written English requirements.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

thank you for the clarifications.

Reviewer 2 Report

I accept the authors' response to my comments in the last round. I think this paper has been adequately revised and deserves to be pubished.