Condition monitoring and validation of railway point machines

Railway signalling equipment at the trackside is currently responsible for approximately 60% of failure statistics related to delays due to signalling problems. Unsurprisingly, there has been increasing interest in railway safety and the optimal management of railway maintenance. Given the fast development of microelectronics and IT technologies in the past decades, it has become possible to add a low-cost, high-quality condition monitoring system to existing railway equipment, e.g. a point machine, to reduce the likelihood of sudden equipment breakdown and to enhance railway service quality. Based on a partnership between University of Oxford and Westinghouse Signals from the UK and Australia, research has been carried out into the development of an on-line conditioning monitoring system for railway point machines, using some of the techniques developed at Oxford for validating industrial instrumentation.