THE EVALUATION OF RAILWAY NOISE ACCORDING TO THE EUROPEAN DIRECTIVES 2002/49/EC AND 2003/613/EC: COMPARISON BETWEEN EXPERIMENTAL DATA AND ESTIMATED VALUES

The European directive 2002/49/EC defines the indicators Lden and Lnight to be used for the description of environmental noise produced by all the main sources (including vehicular, railways and aircraft noise sources). The directive establish that EU member States can use the existing national noise indicators converting them and the available noise data into the proposed indicators. The values of indicators can be determined either by instrumental measurements or predictive methods, specified in the recent 2003/6l3/EC European directive. In this paper we have analysed the application of the EU directive to the evaluation of railway noise using two different approaches for the Lden and Leq calculation, the first based on LAeq values measured in the day, evening and night periods, the second using combinations of single event levels LAE (called SEL) associated to the different railway transits. The specificity of the two methods in order to characterize the specific noise source (with particular reference to identification of “atypical” events and evaluation of noise exposure) has been investigated, also opportunely integrating the above indicators by a suitable set of statistical noise levels Ln. The values of Lden and Lnight obtained in such way has been compared with those computed applying the official interim computation method RMR, for all the most important typologies of italian trains, analysing the differences of indicator values as a function of frequency.