A system for the condition monitoring of railway bogies and of the infrastructure

The application of condition monitoring techniques to rail vehicle and infrastructure is increasingly adopted as a mean to improve realiability and availability in the railway filed and to reduce manteniance costs by switching from time-based to event-driven manteniance polices. This paper reports on a research project aiming at the application of condition monitoring concepts to conventional railway lines. The paper presents the characteristics of a prototype monitoring system which was installed on a E464 locomotive and preliminary results obtained during a period of over a year of locomotive revenue service on Italian conventional lines.