Keywords: safety, railway, track, quality, inertial, dynamic, vehicle.

A new method for track inspection was developed to complement the traditional geometric methods. An inertial measuring system installed on the vehicle is used to acquire the vehicle's response to irregular track input. A specialized data treatment method is used to evaluate railway track safety, observed from the vehicle dynamic performance point of view. System equations for the inverse vehicle dynamic problem are solved to estimate the wheels driving forces which are directly correlated with the vehicle's safety when travelling over track unevenness. Results of a measuring campaign on a railway wagon are used to evaluate the present system, by direct positional comparison with track geometry measurements. Also, data collected and treated are compared with the lateral to vertical dynamic loading safety (L/V) ratio measured with instrumented wheelsets installed on the wagon. The results of the quantified track safety present good agreement with the traditional measuring methods. This confirms the ability of the method to detect the location of the potentially most hazardous regions, for optimised railway track maintenance purposes.

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