A reliability study of railway switch and crossing components

Litherland, Jack; Andrews, John

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.

Citation

Litherland, J., & Andrews, J. (2022). A reliability study of railway switch and crossing components. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit, https://doi.org/10.1177/09544097221100672

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 24, 2022
• Online Publication Date: May 20, 2022
• Publication Date: May 20, 2022
• Deposit Date: May 25, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: May 25, 2022
• Journal: Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit
• Print ISSN: 0954-4097
• Electronic ISSN: 2041-3017
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09544097221100672
• Keywords: Railways; Switches and Crossings (S&C); Asset Management; Poisson Process; Weibull Process
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/8221619
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/09544097221100672?journalCode=pifa