Georeferencing of condition information from railway infrastructure

The condition-based preventive maintenance of the rail infrastructure shall reduce maintenance costs and increase the availability of the rail network in the future. In order to achieve this goal, the current condition of the tracks must be more frequently assessed as of today. This can be achieved, for example, with the deployment of autonomous sensor systems on regular rolling stock to perform measurements during commercial operation. In this scenario a precise and uniform georeferenced collection of condition data is needed for linking time-separated condition assessments and recognizing trends on the deterioration parameters. In this paper we present a modular and portable system for multi-sensor data acquisition on rail vehicles that can be used for train location as well as for condition assessment. Data from different relative and absolute sensors were acquired on a representative test site and combined for the calculation of the vehicle location. First results and analysis are included.