TRACK EQUIPMENT & MAINTENANCE
“IT’S CLEAR THAT OTHER OPERATORS, AND EVEN NETWORK RAIL IN CP5 OR CP6, ARE LOOKING INTO SIMILAR TYPES OF TECHNOLOGY FOR MORE WIDESPREAD USE ACROSS THE NETWORK.”
The trial of trackside ‘listening’ technology has proved such a success for South West Trains that it is now being expanded to cover the whole fleet, as engineering director Christian Roth tells RTM.
xle bearing failures can be costly and hugely disruptive to passenger ser- vices, and traditional ways of monitoring bearing condition have not always been particularly effective.
A
But acoustic ‘listening’ technology, that compares how each bearing sounds with how it should sound, can provide an excel- lent early warning system. The technology uses an array of sensitive trackside micro- phones that listen to each axle bearing on every train that passes.
South West Trains has had the best-known version of this technology, Siemens Mobil- ity’s RailBAM (Bearing Acoustic Monitor), in operation at Swaythling outside South- ampton since late 2009, and in November 2011 it went live with a second system at Mortlake, near Richmond. The locations are vital, as between them, 100% of the South West Trains fleet is now covered. Each train is fitted with a unique tag that can be read by the acoustic monitoring system.
This is only the second such permanent application of the technology in Europe, as Christian Roth, engineering director at South West Trains, told RTM: “Clearly, the reason we installed the second system is because the first was just such a success. It worked very well on trains going to South- ampton through the countryside, and with the system we have been able to detect bearing problems much, much earlier than in the past.
38 | rail technology magazine Dec/Jan 12
“What happened in the past was that usu- ally when a bearing failure occurred, in- stant action was required, or you had a train that needed to be escorted back to a depot. That is very, very disruptive for the train service and for passengers.
“Having this equipment to detect problems earlier has meant we can put the bearing exchange activities into the normal main- tenance schedule, and can plan for that at
least four weeks in advance. That’s meant we haven’t been running into any kind of problems with those kind of bearings.
“Every time a unit goes past that system, the system is picking up if there are bear- ing problems. It can detect a unit number – every unit in the South West Trains fleet is equipped with a tag, and the system has a tag reader, so therefore can identify which unit is going over that system. We can then
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