Automating Network-Wide Infringements & Clearance Surveys

ARTC is Australia’s largest Railway network covering almost 8,500km of network covering New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. Operating primarily freight, grain and coal the network forms an arterial backbone of Australians transportation network. ARTC looked to improve the inspection regime of their diagnostic inspection train by adding an automated Lidar and Imagery based system onboard the AK car (measurement train) to add additional inspection tasks that could be completed. ARTC decided to focus the immediate requirements on streamlining and automating the Infringement and track clearance surveys across the network as the first solution for deployment. Infringement surveys for any network are costly and generally require access by workers to the rail corridor to perform measurements and define the level of infringement. ARTC sought to deploy a safer and more technology-driven inspection solution across its national railroad network.

The Smartscan MLS system was installed permanently on the AK car in late January 2020 during a 2-day maintenance window, and the program successfully entered into a 2-month commissioning stage. After a 2-month commissioning process, the appropriate internal engineering waivers were received to allow ARTC to run an automated data capture, processing and output of track clearance and infringement survey data to update and continuously improve the National Infringement Register. The Cordel team is not carrying out the business analysis process to the scope and define requirements for providing additional data automation solutions using the captured data. In addition to the original scope of works, the Cordel team and ARTC are working collaboratively on identifying, expanding and prioritising future solutions throughout the term of the contract. The additional solutions will include, technical upgrades to the AK Car hardware, automatic ballast profiling, level sighting distances, automatic GIS rail centerline creation and updating and reffing the Linear Reference system.