A study of railway wheel profile parameters used as indicators of an increased risk of wheel defects

The capacity demands on railways will increase in the future, as will demands for a robust and available system. The availability of a railway system is dependent on the condition of its infrastructure and rolling stock. To inspect rolling stock so as to prevent damage to the track due to faulty wheels, infrastructure managers normally install wayside monitoring systems along the track. Such systems indicate, for example, wheels that fall outside the defined safety limits and have to be removed from service to prevent further damage to the track. Due to the nature of many wayside monitoring systems, which only monitor vehicles at defined points along the track, damage may be induced on the track prior to fault detection at the location of the system. Such damage can entail capacity-limiting speed reductions and manual track inspections before the track can be reopened for traffic. The number of wheel defects must therefore be kept to a minimum. In this paper, wheel profile parameters measured by a wayside wheel profile measurement system, installed along the Swedish Iron Ore Line, are examined and related to warning and alarm indications from a wheel defect detector installed on the same line. The study shows that an increased wheel wear, detectable by changes in the wheel profile parameters, could be used to reduce the risk of capacity-limiting wheel defect failure events and their reactive measures.