Condition Monitoring of Railway Track using In-Service Trains

Track recording vehicle equipment has been miniaturised to such an extent that it can be mounted on an in-service vehicle for monitoring track geometry. An alternative approach is to mount a few robust sensors such as accelerometers and rate gyroscopes onto the bogie and axleboxes of an in-service vehicle. The track geometry information that can be obtained from these sensors is incomplete; in particular gauge is unobtainable and data are affected in the lateral direction by the movement of the wheelsets with respect to the track. Nevertheless, estimates of mean vertical and lateral alignment standard deviations and some track geometry faults can be obtained to inform track maintenance. The motion of the bogie and wheelsets with respect to the track, though adversely affecting track geometry reconstruction, may contain valuable information about the interaction between a particular vehicle and the track (or, at least, between the instrumented bogie and the track) that could itself be monitored. This paper illustrates some features observed in the bogie and axlebox obtained from sensors fitted to a Tyne and Wear Metro vehicle that provide information about vehicle/track interaction but do not explicitly reconstruct track geometry