Failure of a pearlitic rail steel with an internal macrocrack

One of most dangerous defects which lead to transverse fractures of rails, namely, internal transverse cracks in a rail head are considered. A rail cross-section surface with a transverse fatigue crack is subjected to a fractographic analysis. The rail sample is taken from the service after many-year service life. The microstructural analysis of the surfaces of the crack and the ambient material shows a substantial degradation of physicochemical properties of rail steel.