Study on the benefits of the advanced techniques used for instrumentation and monitoring of Indian Railway track formations

Railways form an important part of the transportation infrastructure of a country and plays an important role in sustaining a healthy economy. Instrumentation is very much useful on the sites where the subgrade failures like mud-pumping, excessive settlement and shear failure etc. have been experienced. This study includes the available advanced techniques used in the field of instrumentation in railway formations. These field instrumentations have been installed in the problematic sites provide valuable in-situ factors causing mud-pumping and the other failures. In general, commercially available sensors such as piezometers, accelerometers, strain gauges and displacement sensors are used in the track monitoring system. To record the maximum values of pressure transmitted from the sleeper through the ballast and of tie reaction, pressure cells and load cells connected directly to the data logger. Research Design and Standards Organization (RDSO), Indian Railways has initiated field trial of new formation specifications. These field trials require construction and instrumentation of formation as per new specifications at two sites of length 5 km in Bina-Bhopal 3rd line, being executed by RVNL and Jalgaon-Udhana doubling project, Western Railway. In this paper, some instrumentation and validation studies using Finite Element Analysis carried out by IIT Delhi has been reported. Remote monitoring system with advanced techniques is used in the developed countries to control the instrumentation sites and collect the in-situ data's in any time. These different techniques of track monitoring systems can help to maintain the safety of railroad tracks by monitoring settlement, pressure, toe movement, heaving, etc.