Railway Track Monitoring Using Train Measurements: An Experimental Case Study

This paper investigates the use of drive-by train measurements for railway track monitoring. An in-service Irish Rail train was instrumented while using accelerometers and a global positioning system. The measurements were taken over two months and the train bogie accelerations from 60 passes on the Dublin-Belfast line were used for this study. A 6 km section of the line is the particular focus, where the maintenance measurements from a Track Recording Vehicle (TRV) were available. The Hilbert transform is used to obtain the instantaneous amplitudes of the acceleration signals. A new representation of the signal is proposed to show the signal energy level as a function of train location. It is shown that the forward speed of the train has a significant influence on the energy level of the signals. Therefore, a two-step speed correction is applied to the data. First, data from passes with forward speed below a certain limit are removed from the data set. Subsequently, a scaling factor is defined for the remaining signals and the energy levels of those signals are scaled while using online speed measurements. The scaled amplitudes are compared with the TRV data. It is shown that the energy levels of the signals match the TRV measurements very well.