Rail Radar^® provides value-added track measurement information to the railroad industry for their ballast, tie and fastening systems in order to assist with planning decisions for maintenance, rehabilitation and capital construction.

Rail Radar^®'s service provides consistent maintenance procedures for the efficient management of track infrastructure.

The efficiency of the time consuming and subjective task of track component assessments can be significantly improved by Rail Radar^® with its integration of state-of-the-art non-destructive technologies for these assessments.

Many studies in the last two decades using conventional geotechnical ground penetrating radar (GPR) technologies for non-destructive ballast structural assessments have demonstrated the ability to report railbed as-built substructure parameters.

Discussions with Canadian National Railway (CN) in 2002 identified the benefits to the rail industry of extending the application of GPR beyond non-destructive structural measurements to provide accurate and quantitative continuous in-situ ballast material property assessments.

Similar quantitative material property measurement requirements were identified 15 years ago for the roadway industry which lead to the development of ground penetrating radar technology by Road Radar Ltd. which remains unique in the industry (Road Radar Ltd. is an allied company to Rail Radar^® Inc.) The Road Radar^® system (patented in 1994) uses a multiple antenna configuration to collect radar measured material properties (pulse propagation velocity) as well as structural information at each measurement point.

Based on this technology, models for radar measured ballast property variations due to changes in ballast fouling and ballast moisture contents were evaluated during CN sponsored field programs in August 2002. This GPR field program included ballast sampling and laboratory material testing programs and confirmed the hypothesized correlation between ballast fouling and radar measured pulse propagation velocity; increases in ballast fouling result in diminished radar pulse velocity.

The positional referencing system developed by Rail Radar^® for all of its rail data collection programs combines both Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) and accurate linear referencing which includes rail landmark feature tie-in.

• Field trials confirm the importance of field survey data referencing for the comparison of field extracted ballast samples with post-processed GPR ballast parameters.

• Correct referencing also facilitates the identification in the field of localized subsurface anomalies identified during post-processing.

Dialogs with rail industry identified the necessity for integrated technologies capable of providing efficient inventories and assessments of rail ties and the associated track fasteners.

• Rail Radar^® developed sophisticated rail-centered downward looking stereo imaging system and the proprietary image post-processing and feature detection environment to allow the automated classification, and extraction of tie condition and track components parameters. This rail-centered stereo imaging system allows the simultaneous assessment of both gauge and field fastener components for both rails from a single image.

It has been recognized that the track image quality, referencing and presentation capabilities of this imaging system also provide a near ideal methodology for office-based track inspector training to help standardize tie and fastener inventory and defect classifications.

The fully integrated Rail Radar^® system provides the following non-destructive track data collection and analysis capabilities for objective and repeatable track assessments:

• Ballast inventory and assessment using patented GPR post-processing and analysis.
• Tie and fastening systems inventory and assessment using digital image post-processing and analysis.
• Rail joints and OTM using digital image post-processing and analysis.
• Precise positional referencing using differential GPS, linear measurement and track landmark tie-in.
• The Rail Radar^® system is well suited for forensic track analysis, assisting with due diligence and regulatory compliance evaluations, and when combined with a Track Information Management System or Track Network GIS allows comprehensive life-cycle cost and track performance analyses.