Apart from regular wheel wear such as decreasing wheel diameters and reduced flange thicknesses and heights, wheel flats (WF) and oval wheels (or OOR, Out-Of-Roundness) are the most common wheelset problems for railway vehicles. Within the FP7 Research Project “Saferail”, APT has developed an innovative wheelset monitoring system so-called “Wheel flat and Out of Roundness Monitoring (WORM) syst...

In Australia, railway track maintenance costs comprise between 25-35 percent of total freight train operating costs. Track maintenance planning models have been shown to reduce maintenance costs by 5 to 10 percent though improved planning. This paper describes a model which has been developed to deal with the track maintenance planning function at the medium to long-term levels. This model simu...

Natural phenomena like earthquakes, landslides, avalanches or mud flows can cause severe damages of railway tracks. Today’s monitoring concepts either focus on a permanent monitoring of known problematic sites or an epochwise measurement of the railway track with special measurement cars. In this paper we present a new approach for continuous monitoring of railway tracks over long distances. Th...

We consider the Train Timetabling Problem (TTP) in a railway node (i.e. a set of stations in an urban area interconnected by tracks), which calls for determining the best schedule for a given set of trains during a given time horizon, while satisfying several track operational constraints. In particular, we consider the context of a highly congested railway node in which different Train Operato...