Rehabilitation of Railway Track Quality in Relation to Diagnostic Data

Abstract

The railway is a strategic part of the industrial infrastructure of many countries. The overall quality of the railway track structure is affected individually and in various combinations of geometric and material parameters in the form of an extensive set of quality indicators. The quality of a railway track structure during its service life goes through several phases of utilisation (quality degradation) and repairs (quality rehabilitation). Quality indicators represent parameters and factors that are in individual technical groups of the structure capable to objectively describe the quality of their condition and behaviour. At the border of the degradation and rehabilitation phases, the railway manager decides on the implementation of the optimal technical, technological, time and economic format of quality rehabilitation. The decision-making process is subject to the structure and result of the evaluation of the diagnostic data. Although various factors of mechanical properties of the track structure have been investigated for its operational quality in the recent period, the quality of track geometry represented by geometric parameters remains the focus in the decision-making process on the rehabilitation of track quality. This article examines the quality of a specific test section of a railway track from the point of view of the quality of the track geometry. The structure of diagnostic data, the method of their collection, determination of quality indicators and their evaluation are described. The evaluation of quality indicators is connected with models for predicting the future state of track geometry quality using regression and correlation analysis of the dependence of the development of determining quality indicators on time.KeywordsRailwayTrack geometryQualityDiagnosticsMonitoringMeasurementDegradationPredictionRehabilitationMaintenance