Geotechnics in Pavement and Railway Design and Construction

Design and construction of pavements and railways for high speed trains is moving from merely empirical procedures towards a more mechanistic approach based on a better constructed theoretical basis. This will facilitate the use of new materials in transportation infrastructure under various climatic and traffic (load and speed) conditions. In addition, this will lead to a future challenge to implement a common framework between road, railway and geotechnical engineers. These contributions represent an excellent source of recent developments related to the design and construction of pavements, rail tracks and earth structures with emphasis placed on geotechnical background.