Utilising appropriate information technology to support railway condition monitoring

In order to realise the benefits of railway condition monitoring in day to day operation, the industry is dependent on information technology to acquire, analyse, distribute, correlate, present, store, and protect data and information coming from a variety of probes and sensors. Expectations and perceptions of what information technology can do are high in the railway industry as in every other technology supported sector of industry, but attention and best practice in this mandatory part of implementing an end to end solution that reaps real benefits appears to be significantly lacking.