The maintenance of railway tracks is one of the aspects of the railway infrastructure management activity that most influences the technical and economic performance of this transportation system. It is common practice to support the maintenance actions based on the monitoring of the infrastructure condition, for example by carrying out visual inspections and using dedicated track inspection vehicles. Despite the fact that this traditional approach to evaluate the track, based on its condition, is quite effective, it does not provide useful information on the causes that lead to such reduction in performance. Consequently, the maintenance tends to be more corrective and less preventive.
Considering the limitations of the available methods, a R&D project is underway in Portugal aiming at designing, developing and demonstrating the applicability of an innovative and integrated approach to assess the performance of railway tracks, which is also expected to contribute to identifying the causes of some track malfunctions. In this paper we discuss the relevant aspects of this approach and present preliminary results of the tasks currently underway, namely the design and development of the prototype system, including the verification of the measurement chain and its validation in laboratory environment.

railway, track stiffness, continuous monitoring, measurement system.