A reliability centered approach to remote condition monitoring. A railway points case study

Railway turnouts, consisting of switches and a crossing, are complex electro-mechanical devices which are exposed to severe environmental influences and which are essential for the operation of any railway bar horizontal lifts. Their safe and reliable operation must be assured if the rail mode of transport is to flourish. Conventionally, the continuous availability of turnout mechanisms has been assured by high levels of routine maintenance, to some extent tailored to the criticality of a particular point location. However, traffic increases and shortened maintenance windows require better approaches to turnout maintenance. The authors of the present paper undertook the development of algorithms to detect gradual failure in railway turnout which should allow a move to an RCM2 approach to the management of switch and crossing maintenance. They demonstrate the approach using data from tests on a commonly found point mechanism and include a discussion of the benefits of adopting a Kalman Filter for pre-processing the data collected during tests.