Life cycle costs for railway condition monitoring

The European Commission has estimated that by 2020 passenger traffic will double and freight traffic will triple compared with current volumes. Over the same period a reduction of 30% in the life cycle costs (LCC) of trackside assets is desired. Remote condition monitoring (RCM) can help to achieve increases in Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) of trackside assets such as points (switches) and level crossings. Nonetheless, the application of a LCC model to RCM has hitherto been overlooked. Using a real case study, the objective of this paper is to illustrate how the cost-benefit of RCM can be evaluated.