Assessment and Monitoring for Railway Tracks Reliability and Safety using Nondestructive Testing Measurement Systems

The deterioration of railway tracks raises great concerns about the integrity of assessments and evaluations of railway tracks currently in service. Integrated inspection strategies coupled with innovations in inspection technology can lead to significant improvements in operational cost efficiency and reliability without the requirement of a fundamental shift in the existing understanding of the inspection process and standards. This review provides a discussion of the current state-of-the-art in nondestructive testing (NDT) for inspection, testing, and monitoring approaches for internal and surface defects, and condition assessment of railway tracks in general. A critical analysis is made between NDT and visual approaches, including a review of background theory and the techniques used to incorporate condition data into maintenance procedures. Various image processing techniques, along with their applications to different NDT imaging methods and some specific applications in railway tracks, with a discussion of their advantages and shortcomings, as well as future developments and novel inspection methodologies in the field are also presented, in order to show the potential of these approaches for rail infrastructure.