Wayside Condition Monitoring Technologies for Railway Systems

Abstract: The railway is an important mode of transport, due to its environmental friendliness, high safety level, and low energy consumption, among other reasons. Railways provide a sustainable means of transporting a large amount of freight and passengers, in a cost-effective and comfortable way. The railway system has a large number of stakeholders and a small improvement in the system will give many advantages, including financial savings and an increase in the quality of service. The Swedish railway network is old and there has been almost no expansion of the network during the past few decades. There is currently a demand for more track capacity and there are no more tracks availably at the network; therefore, the existing network is expected to deliver more capacity. The railway operators are the largest cause of train delays and wheel failures are one major contributor of the delays caused by operators. The infrastructure manager is the second largest owner of train delays, and a large contributor of their train delays is switches and crossings (S&Cs). This thesis shows proposals for how condition monitoring technology can be used more efficiently for both the infrastructure and the rolling stock to increase the reliability of their critical items by decreasing train delay. Firstly, the condition of the wheel-rail interface is important, in that a bad wheel influences the rail and vice versa. The monitoring of rail profiles is already in use, but the monitoring of wheel profiles is still in the development phase. This thesis shows the performance of a wheel profile measurement system (WPMS) for an extreme climate, and a case study of performance measures such as the accuracy and reliability of the system is presented. An additional topic dealt with is how the information from the WPMS can be combined with that from the wheel defect detectors to find early indications of wheels with bad behaviour. Secondly, the S&C is an essential component of a railway system in that it increases the flexibility by divertingtraffic, but S&Cs need adequate support to work properly. A camera-monitoring method for S&Cs is presented which increases the inspection frequency and decreases the human activities on the track and the train delay. In conclusion, this thesis shows that the WPMS investigated works well with a high level of performance concerning measurement accuracy and reliability in an extreme climate, and that there is still some potential for improving the system. The combination of the WPMS and wheel defect detectors shows that wheels with a high flange height have a higher probability of ending up as wheels suffering from failures. A new maintenance limit for the flange height can reduce the number of wheel defects on the track. Camera-monitoring of the S&C will increase the availability and reliability of this item and even reduce the time on the track required for the maintenance action “check” through fewer inspections and maintenance actions. These proposed monitoring techniques can improve the railway system reliability by reducing the consequential train delay times, by decreasing the number of failures of wheels and S&Cs.