Pavemetrics is proud to announce the recent publication of the Final Project Report by the US Federal Railroad Administration regarding its field trialing of LRAIL technology for the automated inspection of railway assets and change detection.

This report outlines the use of LCMS technology for the automated inspection of Amtrak’s Harrisburg line. For this project a hi-rail testing inspection vehicle was equipped with LCMS-2 sensors to collect 3D scans of the rail surfaces, ties, ballast, fasteners, joints and joint bars. Custom algorithms were developed in order to detect features of interest, make measurements, flag defects and detect changes between repeat runs. Repeat runs were also used to model the bias of measurements and manual ground truth inspections were used to determine accuracy. The project was a success all-around and led to a second round of extended field trialing on Amtrak lines in 2019.

To read the full report published by the FRA: English PDF

Stay tuned for the final report from Phase 2 of this project!