Safe rolling stock operation calls for objective and reliable monitoring of wheel wear which is an important factor affecting passengers’ and cargo transportation safety. Wheel wear developing continuously during operation includes deterioration of the wheel flange cross sectional profile and reduction of wheels’ diameters, which have to be analysed for all wheels in a bogie, and coach. Wheel profile and diameter have to be inspected regularly, as their uncontrolled change with time would pose threat to safety of train operation as, for instance flange angle and root radius are the variables that have a significant effect on the possibility of derailment. In any case change of the wheel profile may lead to the increased rolling contact fatigue which can have expensive and dangerous consequences. Another important issue is the out-of-roundness error, very important especially for the high-speed trains. The wheel wear process is more intensive than the track and turnouts degradation.
Polish fast train operator InterCity decided to monitor its entire fleet of coaches and the relevant measurement system was required, so the laser system was developed by GRAW (Poland) to measure automatically wheel sets on all coaches using the machine vision technology. The system has been designed to perform the automatic, contactless measurement and monitoring of flange height and thickness, Qr parameter, wheel diameters on rail vehicle wheel sets, as well as for bogie geometry control. Moreover, the system can identify coaches from their RFID tags, and based on the wheel history, it can recommend the pre-emptive maintenance operations. The paper presents the measurement system principle and measurement results, as well as the independent portable devices used to verify its readings.

tram, track, vibrations, urban areas, environmental protection