Monitoring Railway Infrastructure Through a Freight Wagon Equipped with Smart Sensors

The monitoring of the railway infrastructure is nowadays of the utmost importance to guarantee the reliability of this kind of transportation and the safety of people involved. To this end, diagnostic trains are regularly employed to perform monitoring activities. However, while along high-speed railway lines their runs are usually scheduled once every two/four weeks, the diagnostic runs are much less frequent along main lines. Therefore, techniques able to detect anomalies on the line through measurements taken on-board in-service vehicles have been proposed in recent years. In this work, a wireless system developed to simultaneously monitor the vehicle dynamics and identify possible issues on specific track sections is presented. The detection of track defects is made possible by analysing acceleration RMS computed in specific frequency bands, considering several travels along the same track section recorded during a long-term experimental campaign. The proposed method would allow carrying out continuous monitoring campaigns, providing freight wagon with a cheap and easy to install measuring setup. In the end, the designed system could support the maintenance strategy along conventional lines, where the runs of the diagnostic vehicles are scheduled at long time periods one apart the other.