Imaging diagnostics of railway turnouts

During its operation, special attention should be paid to issues related to its proper maintenance. To this end, current and periodic inspections should be carried out, which will allow for the early detection and removal of defects, and thus extend the durability of railway turnouts. During the inspections, and in particular during the visual inspection of railway turnout components, detected defects should be archived in the form of photographs. Documentation prepared in this way can be used in subsequent periodic inspections to analyze the changes taking place.A railway turnout is one of the more complex elements of a railway track.
This complexity consists, among other things, in the existence of many moving parts, changes in stiffness zones, and the interlacing of track gauge and flangeway dimensions. These features mean that the durability of turnouts is lower than that of the tracks adjacent to them. In the paper
[1], the authors estimate that the expenditure on maintaining a turnout of length l corresponds to the expenditure on maintaining a track of length 5l, i.e., they are five times greater in relation to the track length.
The currently applicable railway regulations [3] describe the rules and deadlines for carrying out visual inspections and technical examinations of railway turnouts. However, they do not take into account many factors occurring in the maintenance process that have a significant impact on the durability of railway turnouts. (…)

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