Evaluation of Deformation Characteristic of Railway Subgrade Using Reinforced Rigid Walls with Short Reinforcement under Repetitive and Static Loads
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript “Evaluation of deformation characteristic of railway subgrade using reinforced rigid walls with short reinforcement under repetitive and static loads” reports an interesting work concerning the behavior of the reinforced rigid walls characterized by short reinforcements for railway subgrades that require strict displacement restrictions. Particular attention is given to the full-scale test which is clearly described in the paper. The results obtained are well justify and the conclusions highlight the novelty of the study conducted. For these reasons, it is opinion of this reviewer that the manuscript should be considered for the publication in Applied Science Journal after these following improvements:
- Figure 4: (M) indicating “meters” should be written in lowercase. In addition, quality of the Figure should be improved;
- Table 4: the overturning SF obtained for the Section 1L is greater than that obtained considering the sliding. This condition occurs only for Section 1L. Better clarify this aspect;
- Improve the quality of the Figure 16;
- Consider the reference Zucca M., Valente M. “On the limitations of decoupled approach for the seismic behaviour evaluation of shallow multi-propped underground structures embedded in granular soils”. Engineering Structures, 2020, 211, 110497 for the analysis methods in “Until recently, studies on reinforced soil retaining walls using long reinforcements have been conducted in various fields, such as backfill materials [5-7] and analysis methods [8, 9]”.
- Review the layout of the manuscript (including the reference section).
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper describes an experimental study based on a full-scale physical model dedicated for measuring the deformation characteristics of reinforced walls and soil settlement in the context of requirements for the railway subgrade construction. Railway subgrade construction is popular research area, therefore the article is worth considering for publication
because it brings to the subject valuable results of the full-sale experiment measurements. In my opinion there are several issues that need to be addressed before the publicaton.
1. The authors refer to the strict displacement restrictions for the railway subgrade but there is no mention in the article what are these restrictions and how the presented work is helping with meeting the requirements.
2. In the row 356: "The results considering the bearing capacity and deformation characteristics of the RSR developed to meet the residual settlement criteria after the opening of the concrete slab track, which obeys strict displacement restrictions, described below." There is no description of restrictions below that last phrase.
3. What goal has been achieved with the help of the measurements made? How the results obtained help to achieve this goal?
4. The symbols used in the figure 5 are not described.
5. The text editing in the article is inconsistent, the pictures and tables are not correctly positioned in relation to the text.
Best regards
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
