Keywords: PANDA®, Geoendoscopy, railway, maintenance, track characterization, geotechnical tests.

Railway infrastructures are widely spread in many developed countries of the world. Most of which are old and have been maintained and partly renewed to mainly meet the change of rolling stock (from steam train to diesel, to electric). However, the dramatic game change in terms of rolling stock characteristics (load and speed), performance issues and security of course, made it mandatory for the infrastructure managers to invest in renewing partly or completely permanent way. Hence, the asset manager needs a decision making support for maintenance/renewal programs taking into account existing substructures features such as geotechnical properties. Given the extent of these existing lines, and the geological/geotechnical variability of the lines, the idea of a continuous monitoring appears to be very attractive. However, geotechnical properties seem to be almost impossible to assess without localized soundings. Moreover, these tests have to meet existing railway constraints (short possession times, track access, little damage, etc.) which can be major brakes to many existing classical geotechnical tests. Hence, this paper presents a new methodology for railway track characterization based on the coupled use of geophysical and geotechnical tests, providing to the asset manager key point indicators helping with the optimization of the maintenance strategy.

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