Track turnouts are designed to route trains from one track to another, allowing the trains to continue moving safely and efficiently without stopping. Turnout components are expensive, can wear quickly and are costly to repair. Proper maintenance of turnouts is vital to keep trains moving as safely and efficiently as possible, thus inspection of turnout components such as the switch points, flangeway clearances, frog flangeway depth, guard rails and wing rail clearances are vital in determining the condition of a turnout. Manually performing these inspections takes time and may delay train traffic. Additionally, manual inspections are limited to a small number of physical measurements and subjective observations which depend on the experience of the inspector.

Pavemetrics’ LRAIL can identify major turnout components such as the switch points, switch heel blocks, switch rails, the throat and nose of the frog, the wing rails and guard rails and then will make key measurements every 2cm from beginning to end of the measurement region of interest.