This report presents the results of a program to develop and evaluate techniques for the control of wheel/rail noise in urban rail transit systems. The first part of the program included a literature review and a cost-benefit analysis to select, for further study, the most cost-effective wheel/rail control treatments. In this docu¬ment, the focus is on the development, improvement, and validation of the analytical tools to be used in the design, development, and testing of those treatments. An analytical model of the generation of wheel/rail noise was developed and validated through an extensive series of field tests carried out at the Transportation Test Center in Pueblo, Colorado, using the State-of-the-Art-Car. A sensitivity analysis was performed using this analytical model. The analysis showed that wheel/rail noise is relatively insensitive to changes in most system parameter values, except wheel and rail roughness, contact area, and contact stiffness. The surface finish produced by most wheel truing and rail grinding machines was measured.
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