Chris Coates and Jonathon Stelling from Omnicom Balfour Beatty gave a lecture to the Society on the development of track monitoring from in service passenger trains.

A video of this lecture can be viewed by logging into the Members Area and going to Lecture Videos.

Since their start in 1998, Omnicom Balfour Beatty (OBB) has grown to handle the UK’s largest rail data sets and serve most of the major international OEMs. OBB has pushed to digitalise and utilise technology within the rail sector to predict, prevent and optimise rail assets through measurement systems.

Mobile monitoring of these systems generates a wide range of information not only to the alert of defects but also historical information for trend analysis to aid preventative maintenance. As the requirement for near real-time monitoring increases and the endless insights this information can deliver, justifies the reason for extending coverage from Network Rails dedicated measurement fleet to passenger vehicles.

This lecture focused on Unattended Track Geometry Measurement Systems (UGMS), covering their fitment types on passenger borne vehicles and how data is processed and visualised through their mobile monitoring web application RAVE.

RAVE currently visualises UGMS data from various Hitachi passenger trains which cover 4 routes: East Coast Mainline, Great Western, TransPennine and West of England. The appetite and drive for large amounts of data sets, brings the challenges of processing, storing and validating data ready for visualisation. Edge and cloud Artificial Intelligence computing methods overcome these challenges by reducing the amount of data which needs to be transmitted and processed and by removing the need for manual validation of data.