A System approach to improve earth work performance in South Sumatra railway lines

GUSMAN, Deddy, Ir. Djoko Murwono, M.Sc

2010 | Tesis |

The railway in the South Sumatra Region of Indonesia has been operating since 1911. Freight transport is the leader in South Sumatra networks. According to the data from DGR (2009), coal dominates freight transport with 82.5% of the total with remaining 17.5% shared by oil, Portland cement and pulp. In recent times, the condition of the railway infratructure in South Sumatra has deteriorated with many areas of worn out rails, points failures, decayed sleepers, roadbed settlement and track deformation. DGR has identified the areas prone to settlement and deformation. Mostly, these are located along the coal transport mainline and, because there is a risk of train derailment, they require immediate attention. In this thesis the author will observe about improvement of earth work performance in order to reduce the derailments and to generate the lost income. The research objectives are; to evaluate and report on the effect of soil quality, hydrology regarding instability of the railway roadbed, to calculate the stability of the roadbed slope, load bearing capacity of the soil and settlement of the soil, to provide recommendations and suggestion to improve soil condition and to generate cost and financial data to determine accost benefit analysis. In order to achieve the objectives of the research, the author methodology are collecting secondary data such as mapping data, CPT test data, and SPT test data. After that, elaborated the data to identify soil quality and instability of railway roadbed and slope stability. Based on the soil investigation, the condition of all the slopes except at locations III and VII are unstable, where the safety factor is less than 1.40. The most critical condition is the slope at location I where the safety factor is 0.89-0.93. The cone penetration test results show that at all locations the soil materials are soft. The average thickness of the soft soils is 5 metre where safety factor of soil bearing capacity is less than 2. The compaction test result has given the data that relative compaction cannot reach 90% from the minimum requirement. These condition will lead to train derailment and because of it, it will give lost income between Rp 15,523,200,000 to Rp.62, 092,800,000 per year.

Kata Kunci : Improvement of earth work,Railway in the south Sumatra Region,Indonesia