A reliability study of railway switch and crossing components

Abstract

Within any railway network Switches and Crossings (S&C) are essential. They allow trains to change tracks, allowing different routes to be selected. Despite their necessity, they generally have a lower reliability than plain line track and are often subject to breakdowns due to the high number of interlinking electrical and mechanical components they contain. Due to their location such as station throats and major junctions, S&C breakdown is generally very disruptive to traffic causing significant delays. Ensuring that S&C units are maintained correctly and minimising their risk of failure, is therefore of critical importance to railway asset managers. This research uses maintenance and failure data to determine probability distributions for the degradation, failure, inspection and maintenance of nine critical components within S&C units. These distributions can then be used within an asset management framework to simulate the expected operational behaviour of an S&C unit under a given set of conditions, allowing more informed asset management decisions to be taken.