Railway Track Deterioration and Monitoring

The railway track is composed of several components as described in Chap. 3. Each component is subject to different types of horizontal and vertical loads (see Chap. 5) which affect degradation and failure processes. In order to guarantee reasonable safety and comfort levels and prevent catastrophic accidents, it is of fundamental interest to analyse the track efficiency and especially the conformity to normative threshold values of several geometric parameters of the track. For these reasons, nowadays the auscultation of the railway track is carried out by diagnostic trains capable of travelling on all railway lines and performing a series of inspections to evaluate the efficiency of the railway track with high precision.