Abstract

This paper presents an application of Membrane Equilibrium Analysis (MEA) to a historic masonry arch railway bridge in Leeds, United Kingdom. This case study structure is representative of the many masonry arch bridges present on UK and European railway transport networks. It has been chosen because, since 2016, it has been the subject of a detailed Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) campaign, making it an ideal candidate against which to test analytic models. Typically, asset engineers will be responsible for maintaining a large stock of these structures and will lack the time to perform thorough computational analyses. Therefore, simplified approaches, such as MEA, which can offer insight into structural behaviour, have the potential to be highly valuable. This study represents the first step in applying MEA to masonry arch railway bridges.