Track maintenance

Rail continuity bonds and negative feeders should be regularly inspected and tested, and the insulation to earth of the third rail or overhead catenary wires and the running (return) rails maintained satisfactorily. Track maintenance should include the renewal of sleepers and rail bedding material if necessary. 

KPI system To speed up and anchor CIP in the organization, the companies that set the benchmark in this area establish a clear KPI system linking the operational performance metrics consistently and comprehensively to the overall objectives of the company - and these metrics have to be easily understood and reproduced within standard companywide reporting systems. For instance, at Clariant a number of different KPIs have been defined to track maintenance efficiency, but only a few (e.g., repair and maintenance costs/conversion costs) can really be tracked by the production team on the basis of standardized systems (Fig. 19.6). 

This function includes all information about the operational status and maintenance of equipment, vehicles, and facilities. Operational status refers to an availability state (in active service, ready, standby, in/awaiting maintenance, etc.), along with total time in service, time since last regular maintenance, and so on. The ERP system tracks maintenance schedules for the equipment and actual maintenance incidents, both preventive and remedial, and typically an attention list of things that may need inspection and refit. Any maintenance activities include both technical data (nature of fault, repair or change, parts installed, named services performed, etc.) and administrative data (authorization, execution team, date and time, etc.). In addition, this component tracks the schedules, labor, and work assignments of maintenance teams, external maintenance contracts and calls, and actual or assigned costs of maintenance activities. 

For all the devices deemed necessary by the hospital to be utilized effectively, an inventory of those devices needs to be in place. Such a system, therefore, however it is maintained, must be able to provide for the hospital the type of device, the capability of each device, the location, the status, and some way to ensure its availability at the point of care. To meet these requirements, in turn, the devices must be adequately maintained and calibrated. All these functions are routine clinical engineering functions. To ensure that this takes place, some sort of inventory, tracking, maintenance... 

Some would argue that the relation between decreased track maintenance and increases in accident rates was particularly troubling in that die risky behavior (decreased track maintenance) is not easily knowable to the shippers, so the increased risk is not immediately apparent to the shippers. Only through the experience of loss and/or delay of shipments do shippers become aware of the problem (Savage, 1998). 

It is interesting to note that, while problems associated with poor track maintenance have been greatly reduced, they have not disappeared. In a review of accidents that occurred at the CSX railroad in 1997, the General Accoimting Office (GAO, 1998a) concluded that inadequate track maintenance was a contributing factor. 

In the rail industry, even more dramatic re-prioritization of expenditures took place. In particular, annual capital expenditures on track maintenance increased by nearly a factor of five. These increases were made possible, in part, because the requirement to maintain unprofitable routes was eliminated. During the same period, employment in the rail industry was cut by roughly a factor of two. Despite the dramatic labor downsizing, the period after deregulation was also associated with improvements in many aspects of rail safety. In particular, consistent with the increased track maintenance, especially large reductions were noted in those types of accidents related to track condition, such as derailments and collisions. 

Do you have an adequate record-keeping system which tracks maintenance, repairs, and inspections ... 

Itoh, K., Andersen, H.B. and Seki, M. 2004. Track maintenance train operators attitudes to job, organisation and management and their correlation with accident/incident rate. Cognition, Technology and Work, 6(2), 63-78. 

The case involved a complex sequence of events. Investigations pointed to many issues, including flawed operating procedures, driver error, a defective locomotive, poor track maintenance, weak regulatory oversight, and lack of safety redundancy. ... 

In some cases, the updating process can be tied to the engineering reports or discrepancy process. Most facilities use some form of trouble ticket to track equipment and system performance and to report and track maintenance. This same form maybe used to report changes required of the documentation or errors in existing documentation. 

One consequence of this underinvestment was a spate of serious train accidents. Gourvish (1986 8) notes, for example, that the number killed in train accidents in 1947 was the second highest in railway history He reports that the Chief Inspector of Railways attributed five of these accidents to track maintenance arrears. 

Recordkeeping/device tracking/maintenance Although ( AEDs are easy to set up and install, mak-... 

A Colored Petri Net model for railway track maintenance with two-level inspection... 

Railway industry concerns the performance of railway system and railway assets management tries to reduce the railway accidents and the maintenance cost. Derailment is one of railway accidents leading to fatalities and a high corrective maintenance cost. On plain line, derailment may occur when a train travels along a poor condition track. Track inspections and maintenances should be carried out to maintain track condition. Traffic control such as speed restriction cooperates with track maintenance to decrease accident frequencies or reduce accident consequences. Track maintenances cost a lot of money and traffic controls always reduce line availability. System risk metrics, railway line availability and management cost are required to decide when and how to maintain the track and when to perform speed restriction to get fewer accidents with higher availability and lower cost. 

Meier-Hirmer, C., G. Riboulet, F. Sourget, M. Roussignol (2009, September). Maintenance optimization for a system with a gamma deterioration process and intervention delay application to track maintenance. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part O Journal of Risk and Reliability 223(3), 189-198. 

In 2002, an Amtrak auto train derailed due to malfunctioning breaks and poor track maintenance near Crescent City, Florida, causing 4 fatalities and 142 injuries [26]. 

In order to reduce the occurrence of rail-defect-related failures, various methods are used to detect rail defects. These methods include visual inspection by the track maintenance staff, ultrasonic defect detection, eddy-current testing, ground-penetrating radar, impedance spectroscopy, and electromagnetic acoustic transducers [16,17]. 

In railway systems, the construction of continuous welded rails (CWR) is indispensable in reducing noise and vibration, improving the quality of the ride, and reducing the cost of track maintenance. Over the years, many railway accidents have occurred due to rail weld failures. Thus, it is very important to have reliable welds in order to eliminate the occurrence of weld failures in service as well as to extend the CWR service life. 

Ogura, M. Status Quo and Future Outlook of High-Tech Track Maintenance The Latest Report From Japan Railway Company. Japanese Railway Engineering, no. 120 (1992) 1-5. 

Resor, R. R., and R K. Patel. Allocating Track Maintenance Costs on Shared Rail Facilities. Transportation Research Record, no. 1785 (2002) 25-32. 

Resor, R. R., and A. M. Zerembski. Development of Track Maintenance Planning Models for Rail Rapid Transit Systems. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Aided Design, Manufacture and Operation in the Railway and Other Advanced Mass Transit Systems, 1992, 215-226. 

V rokannas, H., H. Anttonen, and J. Niskanen. Health Risk Assessment of Noise, Hand-Arm "Vibration and Cold in Railway Track Maintenance. International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics 13, no. 3 (1994) 247-252. 

However, then came the disastrous decade of the 1960s. The improvement in safety witnessed in previous decades was reversed. Employee fatality and injury rates increased by sixteen percent and seventy-five percent respectively between 1960 and 1970. The major cause was the decline in railroad finances, especially in the East and Midwest with the bankruptcies of the Penn Central, Rock Island and Milwaukee Road, which lead to considerable deferred track maintenance. The rate of accidents per ton-mile caused by track defects doubled between 1966 and 1974 (Office of Technology Assessment, 1978). Simultaneously with the decline in track maintenance was the introduction of larger freight cars. This lead to a sharp rise in derailments due to broken rails (NTSB, 1974). 

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