Japanese railway condition monitoring of tracks using in-service vehicle

This paper summarizes the track-condition-monitoring system for conventional and high speed railway used in Japanese railway. For conventional railway, rail irregularities are estimated from the vertical and lateral acceleration of the car body. The roll angle of the car body, calculated using a rate gyroscope, is used to distinguish line irregularities from level irregularities. Rail corrugation is detected from cabin noise with spectral peak calculation. A GPS system and a map-matching algorithm are used to pinpoint the location of faults on tracks. Field test using in-service vehicle was carried out to evaluate the developed system. The results show that the condition of rail irregularity and rail corrugation can be estimated effectively. For high speed railway, shinkansen, the track condition monitoring system called RAIDARSS 3 is introduced.