The condition of turnouts is still evaluated manually by the inspection staff. Generally, the railway infrastructure manager blocks the track section during the inspection time. This leads to a decreasing availability. Moreover, employees are working in danger areas. Nonetheless, all of those inspection tasks have further challenges. The evaluated condition depends on the subjective assessment of the staff and the inspections carried out are not completely reproducible and do not allow a prognosis of maintenance demands yet. Finally, the manual inspections are executed without the load-impact of rail vehicles. These facts show the need for a shift from a manual inspection to an automatic self-inspection of turnouts towards a smart infrastructure. The measurement systems for open track and turnouts as also for the fix-installed, wayside sensors of eight companies were thus chosen and analysed and then compared with the inspection tasks of the Swiss Federal Railways to identify the feasibility of this automatic self-inspection.

turnout, infrastructure, inspection, maintenance demands, prognoses