Abstract:Wheel-rail force have a significant impact on the quality and safety of vehicle running. It used a special-made Instrumented wheelset detection and track static detection for the existing wheel-rail force measurement. But, it is costly, time-consuming and lack of stability. A method of reduced-order state observer is put forward based on the research of existing wheel-rail force measurement. A single wheelset vertical coupling model is built in this paper, also, the response values of vehicle state and track stimulation as the reduced-order state observer inputs. By MATLab Simulation, the observed values of wheel vibration displacement fast convergence in simulation values, wheel-rail force matches well. As the vehicle speed increases vibration displacement convergence time becomes longer and the wheel-rail force error increases. The results show that, under certain conditions, this method observes the wheel-rail force well, and it provides a new method for estimating the wheel-rail forces in real-time.