Robust, reliable sensors monitor rail rolling stock

Robust, reliable sensors monitor rail rolling stock – providing the earliest warning of equipment wear or monitoring critical fluid levels to maximise reliability and efficiency

The impact of rail delays caused by maintenenace issues is surprisingly high ranging from near 40% in certain European countries through to in excess of 90% on some US rail networks. In the ANZ region, maintenance issues are acknowledged as a significant contributor to rail delays, affecting operational efficiency across various networks.  

There are many reasons for maintenance related delays and increasingly continuous monitoring techniques are being applied, providing the opportunity to identify a critical change at a point which allows a proactive intervention to be scheduled, before the impact of wear, deterioration or other measured issue has had the opportunity to cause disruption and delay. 

Examples include the latest condition-based monitoring (CBM) tools allowing maintenance professionals to continuously monitor the condition of gearboxes, axles and other rotating equipment, and be alerted to wear issues at the earliest opportunity. Measurement from within the equipment itself allows confident prediction of the first stages of failure when there is time to schedule corrective action.

Read more about how this works in practice:  https://gillsc.com/detect-machinery-failures-faster/    

Other measures can include continuous monitoring of coolants or other critical liquids, again to alert maintenance teams when parameters have changed and attention is required. This has proved particularly important on rail networks operating close to capacity – read more in the application note:   https://gillsc.com/railway-coolant-level-sensor/