Railway Systems
Travelling safely and comfortably on high speed railway lines requires excel-lent conditions of the whole railway infrastructure in general and of the railway track geometry in particular.
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Diagnosis of Railway Track Condition
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26.1
L. Quiroga and E. Schnieder
Travelling safely and comfortably on high speed railway lines requires excellent conditions of the whole railway infrastructure in general and of the railway track geometry in particular. Since the maintenance process required to achieve such excellent conditions is largely complex and expensive, it demands an increased amount of both human and technical resources. As depicted in Fig. 26.1.1, the most relevant track faults can be divided into those concerning the track geometry and those concerning the rail
L. Quiroga E. Schnieder (&) TU Braunschweig, Inst. f. Verkehrssicherheit u. Automatisierungstechnik, Langer Kamp 8, 38106, Braunschweig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] L. Quiroga e-mail: [email protected]
surface. These are both measured by means of a special measuring coach. Geometry faults are prevented and corrected by means of tamping, rail surface faults by means of grinding. Safety and comfort are not affected directly by the rail surface quality but rather by the track geometry. However, the rail surface quality has a major impact on the degradation rate of the track geometry and ultimately on its expected useful life. In this framework, choosing the right maintenance strategy is a very important issue. A reliable diagnosis of the railway geometry ageing process is indispensable for an optimised planning and scheduling of maintenance activities. After this short introduction, in Sect. 26.1.1 the main features of track geometry and its ageing process are stated. Section 26.1.2 presents the measuring coaches used to measure
H. Czichos (ed.), Handbook of Technical Diagnostics, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-25850-3_26, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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L. Quiroga and E. Schnieder
the track geometry deviations in France. Section 26.1.3 describes the maintenance activities most relevant to the track geometry, namely tamping and grinding. Then Sect. 26.1.4 gives an insight on the role of track condition diagnosis within the track geometry maintenance process. In Sect. 26.1.5 track geometry degradation and restoration models are described. These models are the basis for the diagnosis method introduced in Sect. 26.1.6. Finally Sect. 26.1.7 presents some concluding remarks.
26.1.1 Features of the Railway Track Geometry Upon the forces arising when a train moves on a railway, the track reacts with geometrical deviations on the rail surface Lichtenberger [1]. According to EN 13848-5 (EN13848-5), the most relevant parameters of track geometry are the following: • Cross level (see Fig. 26.1.2a) • Alignment (see Fig. 26.1.2b) • Longitudinal levelling (see Fig. 26.1.2c) • Twist (see Fig. 26.1.2d) • Gauge. For each of these parameters, EN 13848-5 defines three different alarm limits:
• Attention limit: the track geometry must be inspected regularly. • Intervention limit: if this level is trespassed, a corrective intervention is necessary in the short term, to prevent the deviation to trespass the safety level befo
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