Pavemetrics is pleased to share the US Federal Railroad Administration’s recent publication of the Final Project Report for its second phase of LRAIL testing.

This report details the extended field trialing of LRAIL inspection and change detection technology on Amtrak lines for the purpose of modeling sensitivity, noise floor and repeatability under typical railway network conditions.

For this project, LRAIL technology was installed on a specialized hi-rail inspection trailer and data were captured on Amtrak lines over a 4-month period in three separate deployments across an 8-mile test loop near the Delaware-Pennsylvania border.

Repeat runs in the same direction and reverse runs were captured during each deployment to model repeatability, mean, and standard deviation of measurements. The noise floor for change detection was also modeled through analysis of repeat runs and the detection of known/deliberate changes.

LRAIL change measurements were determined to be highly repeatable, with an overall average of 99.28 percent agreement between runs.

Read the full report published by the FRA: English PDF