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Procedia Structural Integrity 17 (2019) 448–455

ICSI 2019 The 3rd International Conference on Structural Integrity

Continuous Monitoring and Evaluation of Railway Tracks:

System Description and Assessment
João Moraisa*, Carlos Santosa, Paulo Moraisa, André Paixãob, Eduardo Fortunatob,
Francisco Asseiceiroc, Paula Alvarengac, Luís Gomesc,
a
Scientific Instrumentation Centre, National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC), Av. do Brasil 101, Lisboa, 1700-066
Portugal bTransportation Department, National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC), Av. do Brasil 101, Lisboa, 1700-066
Portugal cMota-Engil, Engenharia e Construção. S.A., Rua Rego Lameiro 38, Porto, 4300-454 Portugal

Abstract

A R&D Project was completed in Portugal that aimed at designing, developing and demonstrating the applicability of an
innovative and integrated approach to assess the performance and condition of railway tracks. This approach is also expected to
contribute to identify the specific causes of some track performance degradation, namely those that are related to the
characteristics of the layers and the geomaterials that compose the substructure of the track. A system prototype was developed
and installed on board of a self-propelled railway maintenance vehicle. The system is designed to continuously evaluate the
vertical stiffness of the track and to detect disturbances on the dynamic contact interface between the wheelsets and the rails,
some of which can be related to defects on the tracks. The system is also able to post-process the acquired data.
This paper includes an overall system description of the prototype implemented based on the discussed approach and the first
experimental tests performed with said prototype, regarding the system assessment. These tests were performed on a railway
track, adjacent to a maintenance yard. The track was instrumented with additional on-site equipment to serve as reference for the
prototype’s assessment. The data obtained from the preliminary tests suggest that the proposed approach is adequate in this
context.
© 2019 T h e
9 T h
A ut ho rs . P ub l is h e d b y E l se vi e r
e A u th o r s. P u b l is h e d b y E l s
B .V.
e vi e r B.V.
Peer-review under responsibility of the ICSI 2019 organizers.
Peer review under responsibility of the ICSI 2019 organizers
Keywords: railway track performance; train-track interaction; track stiffness; instrumentation
train track interaction; track stiffness; instrumentation

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +351 218443683; fax: +351 218443200.

* EC-omrraeislpaodnddriensgs:aujmthoorra.iTs@el.l:n+ec3.5p1t 218443683; fax: +351 218443200.
E mail

2452 3216 © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

- .

2452-3216 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Peer-review under responsibility of the ICSI 2019
organizers.
10.1016/j.prostr.2019.08.059
44 João Morais et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 17 (2019) 448–455 44
9 9

1. Introduction

Railroad infrastructures suffer degradation on its initial geometry during their lifetime usage, largely due to
successive passages of vehicles, but also due to other phenomena like atmospheric conditions. In practice, rails
relative position is no longer the most appropriate and thus creates, for example, geometry defects that negatively
affect the overall system performance. Railroad maintenance is one of the aspects of railway infrastructure
management activity that most influence the technical and economic performance of this transport system, either
because it involves huge funds, or because it has significant impacts on system availability. Adequate maintenance
management should include decision-making based on the knowledge regarding system degradation and failures,
usually obtained by visual inspection and auscultation of the railway.
Traditional approaches of assessing railroad conditions, such as those based on the standard EN 13848 (2019),
are quite effective in identifying sites that negatively affect the functional and structural performance of the railway,
but they do not provide useful information regarding the causes that led to this performance degradation.
Consequently, maintenance actions tend to be more corrective in nature than preventive or predictive, which
negatively influences the efficiency of infrastructure management.
In an attempt to improve railway assessment methods, some authors have proposed that the analysis of geometric
condition should not just be based on comparisons between the geometric parameters values usually measured and
their maximum values. It should include the dynamic response of the system, in particular the railway-vehicle
interactions and vehicle velocity (Paixão et al., 2015).
Over the past few decades, there has been a surge of interest on the scientific and technical communities
regarding the measurement of railway vertical deflection and its vertical stiffness. Vertical stiffness influences the
carrying capacity of railway and its response regarding the passage of vehicles, thus representing an important
parameter to evaluate geometric quality degradation of the railway and their respective maintenance costs (Le Pen et
al., 2016; Quibel et al., 2010; INNOTRACK, 2008).
Considering the limitations of the current methods, a research project named COURSE was implemented by
LNEC in partnership with Mota Engil, Engenharia e Construção. S.A.. This project aimed at designing, developing
and demonstrating the applicability of an innovative and integrated approach to assess railway performance. It also
contributed to identify the causes of railway degradation, taking into account aspects related to the structural
response of the dynamic interaction between railway and vehicle. The developed approach should enable continuous
evaluation of railway functional and structural parameters, with the use of an instrumented railway vehicle. This
should allow for the proposed system to operate without disturbing railway infrastructure operations, thus providing
a more efficient solution. Under this project, a system prototype was developed and embedded into a self-propelled
vehicle, with the following functionalities:

• Evaluation of vertical deformation and vertical stiffness variations of the railway throughout its length;
• Detection of disturbances in the dynamic contact interfaces between the vehicle and rails;
• Post-processing of the obtained data, providing on-board and on-demand relevant information regarding railway
defects and overall condition.

This paper includes an overall system description of the prototype implemented based on the proposed approach
and the first experimental tests performed with the prototype, regarding system assessment and calibration. These
tests were performed on a railway track, adjacent to a maintenance yard. The track was instrumented with additional
on-site equipment to serve as reference for the prototype’s assessment. The data obtained from the preliminary tests
suggest that the proposed approach is adequate in this context.

2. Overall prototype system description

The proposed railway vertical stiffness evaluation method is based on measurements of railway vertical
deformation, due to the weight of the instrumented vehicle, relative to the chassis of the vehicle. By measuring the
distance between the middle section of the vehicle and the railheads areas directly below, assuming those railheads
areas are sufficiently apart from the wheels and thus not deformed by the presence of the vehicle, it is possible to
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0 0

obtain information related to the deformability of the railway. When the vehicle deforms the railway line under the
wheels, due to its weight, the distance between the middle section of the chassis and the railway diminishes
proportionally to the average railway stiffness on the measurement point. Then, by taking into account and
removing the relative movement between the chassis and the rails due to the presence of the vehicle’s suspension
system, it is possible to obtain an adequate estimate of the deformation imposed on the rails by the passage of the
vehicle. This relative movement is measured on four points between the shafts of the vehicle's wheels and its
chassis. The railway vertical stiffness is translated by the ratio between the vertical force applied by each wheel and
the elastic vertical deflection of the rail. Regarding the identification of railway defects that affect the
vehicle-railway dynamic interaction, this is accomplished by measuring the accelerations transmitted to the vehicle
with accelerometers installed on each wheelset and on both cabins. The developed system is also capable of
measuring railway physical parameters that are usually not evaluated by conventional auscultation vehicles. The
solution is based on an integrated system consisting of four subsystems, which are embedded in the vehicle,
namely:

• Instrumentation subsystem, responsible for measurement of relevant physical quantities related to the vehicle-
railway interactions, through a set of sensors and transducers;
• Data acquisition subsystem, intended for the collection and conversion of the sensors data to digital
format;
• Data collection subsystem, responsible for communication with the data acquisition system and management,
command and import of data acquired by it. It also performs a preliminary data processing and allows for on-
board data visualization by the system operator and data storage;
• Computer application intended to process the acquired data, transforming it into useful information regarding the
management of railway infrastructures.

The prototype system was installed in a self-propelled vehicle, model DD 450B, manufactured by SVI. After
studying and analyzing several solutions, it was considered that the most suitable solution for measuring the
deformation of the rails in relation to the chassis consisted in six laser displacement transducers (reference NCDT
1402). Four of these transducers are intended to measure the distance between the vehicle chassis and the wheel
shafts, and the other two are intended to measure the distance between the middle of the vehicle chassis and each
corresponding railhead (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Schematic view of the instrumentation locations in the railway vehicle.

Two high-sensitivity ±4 g triaxial accelerometers (reference FBA ES-T) are installed inside the vehicle's cabins
and arranged symmetrically in the front and rear areas. Four high-range ±500 g accelerometers (reference PCB
45 João Morais et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 17 (2019) 448–455 45
1 1

356A02) are mounted on the wheel boxes. These sensors are used to complement the relative position
measurements
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2 2

between the vehicle chassis and wheel shafts and to measure the vehicle dynamics and interactions with the tracks.
The system also includes two velocity sensors, installed on front and rear shaft. These sensors, developed in LNEC,
are based on a magnetic proximity sensor, made by SICK (reference MM18), sensing the passage of eight magnets
embedded in a stainless steel ring attached to each shaft. The signal generated by these velocity sensors
complements the information obtained by a GPS system installed on the vehicle, to allow proper geo-referencing of
the recorded data. The data acquisition system used (reference ARK-2150F plus Q.Station) is capable of acquiring
26 simultaneous channels, at a sampling frequency of 1000 Hz, which corresponds to a spatial resolution of 20 mm
for a vehicle speed of 20 m/s.
After the system requirements were established and the solution that would be used was developed, the different
components were acquired. Preliminary system calibrations of the measurement chains were performed, under
laboratory conditions, to ensure that the quality of the acquired information complied with project specifications.
These tests confirmed the proper functioning of the entire system, in terms of signal generation by instrumentation,
data acquisition and communication between the two subsystems. The first data processing performed by the
computer application developed was also successful. For a full description of the proposed system and the
preliminary calibration tests in laboratory conditions, refer to the paper by Santos et al. (2018)

3. Prototype system implementation

In the context of this project, a self-propelled rail vehicle was adapted to house the system previously described.
The adaptation procedure consisted on mounting the instrumentation in exterior and interior locations of the vehicle,
construction of fastening and protection elements for said instrumentation and assembling other complementary
components, such as wiring harnesses and technical cabinets/interface boxes. Given the almost symmetrical form of
the vehicle, it was considered adequate and even advantageous to divide the data acquisition and data collection
subsystem by the two vehicle cabins, in a distributed architecture configuration. Fig. 2 shows some examples of the
installed devices.

a) b) c) d)

Fig. 2. Instrumentation used on the prototype vehicle: a) ±500 g accelerometer installed on a wheel box cover; b) velocity sensor installed on
a wheels shaft; c) laser displacement transducer installed over a wheels shaft; d) ±4 g accelerometer installed in the vehicle cabins.

For this task, it was necessary to design, assemble and mount several mechanical interfaces on the vehicle,
establish cable paths for the instrumentation and communication wiring, including the opening of passage holes
between the outside and the inside of the vehicle cabins, fix interface boxes and cabinets, among other tasks (Fig.
3). In order to ensure proper installation of the system, taking into account the specifics related to the
instrumentation and to the vehicle and its operation, a close collaboration between the various elements of LNEC
and Mota-Engil was fundamental. Given that a significant part of the instrumentation and wiring was mounted in
the under belly of the vehicle, these tasks had to be carried out in a railway vehicle pit, in a Mota-Engil maintenance
yard.
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3 3

a) b) c) d)

Fig. 3. Installation of the instrumentation: a) ±500 g accelerometer without its protective cover;
b) connection boxes installed near a wheels shaft; c) welding of a support for one displacement transducer;
d) metal cutting operations for wiring and ±4 g accelerometer installation.

4. Prototype system calibration and assessment

System calibration and validation tests were performed. To this end, a railway section adjacent to the
maintenance yard was selected and prepared for this purpose. Several additional systems and instrumentation were
installed to monitor the structural response of the selected railway track and serve as reference.
It is known that measuring railway deformations is a difficult task to achieve, even with on-site instrumentation.
The simplest solution for measuring railway deformation would be the use of displacement transducers. However,
this solution requires the establishment of a reference point (static, outside the interference zone), to be used by the
displacement transducers. Since the area surrounding the rail also suffers deformation, this reference point must be
set at a distance such that it is not affected by the load imposed on the rails. Under these conditions, the reference
point would have to be established at a minimum distance of two to three meters, which would create other
constraints and make this solution unfeasible. So it was decided to implement a vision type non-contact monitoring
system, based on a video camera and a set of LED active targets. The railway track was also instrumented with a
redundant system to measure the applied deformations, based on high-sensitivity accelerometers, with the ability to
measure acceleration in static conditions (Fig. 4).

E W
Distance
between
sleepers (cm)

Sleepers LEDs

Accelerometers

Fig. 4. Diagram representing the instrumentation positions in the railway track used for the calibration tests.

The vision type non-contact monitoring system, based on computational vision techniques, is composed of an
industrial-type video camera with 1920 × 1080 pixel resolution. In order to minimize the effects of ambient lighting,
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the video camera was equipped with an optical bandpass filter that cuts radiation with a wavelength of less than
about 750 nm, thus eliminating most of the visible radiation spectrum. As an alternative to traditional passive
targets, these tests used active LED targets, developed in LNEC, which emit radiation in the near infrared spectrum
(emission peak at 875 nm). These active targets were mounted on the side of the rails of the railway track, facing the
video camera. The six uniaxial accelerometers used, type Force Balance (reference FBA ES-U2), produced by
EpiSensor, were also mounted on the side of the rails. Signal conditioning and data acquisition were performed
using a monitoring system developed in LNEC. For the vision system, data was collected either with several static
photos or through films acquired at a rate of 10 frames per second. The on-site accelerometers data was also
acquired at 1000 Hz (Fig. 5).

a) b) c) d)

Fig. 5. Instrumentation installed on the railway track: a) accelerometers on the rails; b) industrial-type video camera, c) active LED targets;
d) image taken with the video camera, using an optical bandpass filter.

The calibration tests were performed in two phases: off-set determination for all the on-board instrumentation (on
the concrete slab of the maintenance yard) and measurements of the structural response of the selected railway track
using the on-board and on-site instrumentation, due to the passage of the railway vehicle.
The first phase consisted on establishing the zeros of the displacement transducers, i.e., registering data from
these transducers acquired under conditions corresponding to infinite stiffness of the underlying platform. To this
end, it was considered that the concrete slab of the maintenance yard met these conditions, when compared to the
typical stiffness ranges from railway tracks. Initial off-set determinations were also carried out for all
accelerometers. Thus, with the vehicle stationary in this area, the necessary measurements were made. The number
of samples collected allowed us to make a statistical analysis and to determine the so-called "zeros of the system".
The second phase tests were performed at low vehicle speeds (around 1 m/s). The tests consisted on several
passages of the instrumented vehicle over the selected railway track. Due to the low velocities that were possible to
employ safely in such a small track length, all the data corresponding to accelerometers was not usable (low energy
levels that could not produce relevant dynamic results).
Post-processing of the obtained data and the subsequent analysis of the results allowed us to conclude that the
vision system was successful in monitoring the deformed state of the rail, resulting from the passage of the vehicle.
The peak deformation values obtained with this method were comprised between 2.0 mm and 2.7 mm for the several
vehicle passages. The embedded displacement transducers, after applying the previously described processing
method to the data, were also capable of measuring railway deformations between 2.0 mm and 2.6 mm. However, an
unforeseen problem was detected on the data provided by the two central displacement transducers. The zones
selected to install these transducers appear to be highly susceptible to the engine induced vibration frequency, thus
entering controlled resonance vibration conditions under specific circumstances. Still, it is considered that the results
obtained with the two systems are compatible with each other.
Fig. 6 shows the obtained results with the vision system on one of the vehicle passages. Apart from the induced
vibration on the railway track, due to the presence of the vehicle, this figure clearly shows the passage of both axles
over the instrumented area. Also, other important features, such as the slight negative deformation of the railway
track when the vehicle’s middle section passes over the targets, are possible to acquire with this vision based system.
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5 5

Fig. 6. Vertical deformation obtained with the vision system during one passage of the vehicle (E-W direction).
Positive Y values imply a downward deformation of the railway track.

Fig. 7 shows the collected data with the on-board displacement transducers, regarding the same vehicle passage
as showed on Fig. 6. The right side data corresponds to the instrumented rail, showing the compatibility between
the results obtained with both methods. The data presented here regarding the two displacement transducers located
in the vehicle middle section are already processed according to the methodology described in chapter 2. Here the
resonant response of the middle displacement transducers is visible. While this behaviour is undesirable, average
values can still be calculated to extract the resulting railway deformation.

Fig. 7. Vertical deformation obtained with the laser displacement transducers during one passage of the vehicle (E-W direction).
Positive Y values imply that the displacement transducers are closer to their targets.

Based on the acquired data, the results demonstrate the feasibility of the embedded system to measure railway
deformations in quasi-static regime. Relevant considerations regarding railway defects detection were not possible
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6 6

to be made, since the short railway track length tested did not appear to have any. In order to test the proposed
system with higher vehicle speeds that translate usual operation conditions of railway vehicles, another experimental
test campaign was performed. This new test campaign will be described on the second conference paper regarding
this project.

5. Conclusions

The COURSE project included the design, development and demonstration of the applicability of an innovative
and integrated approach to evaluate the performance of railway tracks, while also being able to identify the causes
of common railway degradation defects. This paper presented an overall description of the system developed under
the proposed concept. Also prototype implementation was discussed, together with the corresponding calibration
tests, regarding system assessment. These calibration tests were performed on a railway track, adjacent to a
maintenance yard. The track was instrumented with additional on-site equipment to serve as reference for the
prototype’s assessment. The data obtained from the preliminary tests suggest that the proposed approach is
adequate in this context. The first tests using the prototype on a railway track under regular operation will be
presented on the second paper submitted to ICSI 2019 on this topic.

Acknowledgements

This work was carried out under the I&D COURSE project, co-financed by the European Regional Development
Fund (ERDF) through the “Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização” (POCI), under the
Portugal 2020 and Lisboa 2020 programs [LISBOA-01-0247-FEDER-017937]. Postdoctoral fellowship of the forth
author [SFRH/BPD/107737/2015] was supported by “Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia”, through POCH
co-financed by the ESF and national funds of MCTES, Portugal.

References

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study. Engineering Structures 88, 216-224.
Le Pen, L., Milne, D., Thompson, D., Powrie, W., 2016. Evaluating railway track support stiffness from trackside measurements in the
absence of wheel load data. Canadian Geotechnical Journal 53, 1156-1166.
Quibel, A., Hosseingholian, M., Guillevic, G., 2010. The role of stiffness in railway infrastructures and its measurement. IV Jornadas
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