Cost-Effective Monitoring of Railroad Bridge Performance

The railroad network carries 40 % of the freight in the US. Railroad bridges are the most critical part of the network and they need to be properly maintained for safety of operations. Railroad managers inspect the bridges to assess their structural condition. Railroad managers are interested in measuring displacements under train crossing events to prioritize their bridge management and safety decisions. However, bridge displacements are difficult to collect in the field, because they require a fixed reference from where to measure. Accelerations can be used to estimate dynamic displacements but to this date, the pseudo-static displacements cannot be measured using reference-free sensors. This study proposes a method to estimate the total displacements of a railroad bridge under live train loads using acceleration and tilt data without a need for fixed reference. Researchers used real bridge displacement data representing different bridge