Railway track condition monitoring based on acceleration measurements

Track irregularity is the main source of external excitation for a rolling stock system. Therefore monitoring railway track condition is vitally important to safe train operation. In this paper, methods for track irregularity monitoring from acceleration measurements on board the train are presented. Measurements are the acceleration of car-body, and track characteristics are reflected through vibration characteristics of cart body. Analysis methods include differential, RMS, PK2PK, and wavelet decomposition. Results in the time and frequency domain show that the presented methods can identify the track irregularities quite well. The study provides a solution to track irregularity monitoring.