A Method to Define the Rail Quality Condition due to Wear

The railway track is subject to several typologies of damage that reduce the track performance and safety and must be taken into serious account to define the maintenance operations. For some type of damage, such as alignment error or gauge variation, it is simple to define the track quality using for example a scalar value directly related to the measure of the quantity involved. In other cases, such as for the wear of the profile, it is not immediate to understand the level of damage related to a worn profile, since it involves a complex shape variation. Furthermore the methodology used to measure the profile shape, cannot be neglected when defining a method to estimate the profile capability when worn.