Tramway Track: a New Approach for Measuring the Transverse Profile of Worn-Out Rails

Monitoring the wear condition of the tramway superstructure is one of the key points to guarantee an adequate safety level of the light rail transport system. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new non-conventional procedure for measuring the transverse profile of rails in operation by means of image-processing technique. This methodological approach is based on the “information” contained in high-resolution photographic images of tracks and on specific algorithms which allow to obtain the exact geometric profile of the rails and therefore to measure the state of the rail-head extrados wear.