Status and perspectives of the "Specially Monitored Track"

Deutsche Bahn AG has developed and continuously improved over the last decade a system called "Specially Monitored Track". It is based on the fact that the noise emission from railways can be reduced by rail grinding and has been confirmed officially in 1998 by the German Federal Railway Office (EBA) as a noise reduction system with an effectiveness of -3dB(A). Meanwhile almost 1000 km of DB's network are specially monitored. In order to comply with this legislation, intensive grinding and monitoring is required. The latter is done by a dedicated monitoring car and supplemented by roughness measurements using a modified roughness-measuring device in connection with a newly developed algorithm for data analysis, enabling a prediction of the noise emission on the basis of roughness measurements. Future developments will aim at increasing the performance of the system "Specially Monitored Track". This will particularly include grinding at high working speeds ("High Speed Grinding") with two targets: (1) reducing costs for rail grinding and (2) merging rail grinding for acoustic reasons with grinding for regular track maintenance. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.