On Thursday 15 May, Strukton Rail signed a contract with Eurailscout Inspection & Analysis for carrying out video inspections on the Dutch railway network. Annually Eurailscout will make about 800 inspection runs. The contract covers all areas maintained by Strukton Rail.
The video inspection trains will inspect all major railway yards and main lines. The frequency of switch inspections will depend on the local load burden and will vary from once a week to once a month.
For Strukton Rail this means that the majority of visual inspections by maintenance workers on foot will become obsolete. Because there is less need to walk on the tracks, the new method contributes significantly to the safety of Strukton's railway workers. It also increase efficiency, because visual inspections are time-consuming and labour-intensive. Travellers will benefit from the video inspections, because the safety measures required for inspections on foot usually lead to disruptions of the train schedule.
The video material recorded by the video inspection trains will be watched in Strukton Rail's viewing room. There the inspectors concentrate mainly on safe operability of the tracks, but they also look deeper into the matter. They look, for instance, for signs of wear and tear, burr formation and minute cracks.
Eurailscout has the expertise to assess the state of the tracks with the use of various techniques. Apart from the video inspection trains, to which this contract applies, it deploys several types of measuring vehicle (ultrasonic, eddy current). Eurailscout is also an expert in the analysis of the gathered measuring data.
Strukton Rail and Eurailscout jointly developed the mobile video inspection units which are used to inspect rail infrastructure fast and without the need of taking tracks out of service. The first video inspection train, VST-05, was put in operation in early 2006. In december 2007 a generation in which several innovations were implemented was brought on the tracks. At the moment three trains of the new VST-07 type are in service.