Condition monitoring of the railway line and overhead equipment through onboard train measurement - an Italian experience

The paper describes a research project being performed by RFI (Italian track owner) and Politecnico di Milano concerning the diagnostics and condition monitoring of the railway track and overhead equipment. The program aims particularly at increasing the availability of precise information concerning the maintenance status of the line both by introducing new diagnostic techniques to detect geometric defects generally not addressed by existing diagnostic trains, and by extending the availability of information concerning the state of the line by the use of diagnostic units installed on trains from the standard fleet.