Wear monitoring for meter gauge railway
Customer: Montreux-Oberland-Bahn (MOB), Switzerland
Project tasks
- Project management
- Concept development
- System integration
Our approach
The Montreux Oberland Railway (MOB) was faced with a challenge when it was suddenly confronted with increased noise and heavy wear on the wheels and rails of a large number of vehicles in its fleet. Various vehicles showed unexpectedly high signs of wear.
PROSE carried out two days of acoustic measurements on a vehicle travelling on the MOB network. We used wireless microphones that were magnetically attached under the car body on each side of the train. The acoustic signals were sent wirelessly to a laptop inside the vehicle. With the help of special acoustic software, these acoustic signals were transferred from the time domain to the frequency domain in real time. Based on the amplitudes in certain frequencies, the problem of noise and wear in certain curves of the network could be localised. Additional measurements on the rails showed that the wheel flange lubrication on the rail was inadequate and was causing noise and wear. After manually lubricating around 10 curves on the 45 km network, the wear disappeared completely and the noise was reduced.
Customer benefit
The MOB had to reduce its services as the wear and noise pollution were no longer acceptable. After the problem was analysed and localised by PROSE-experts on the MOB network within a day of the measurement, noise and wear were reduced to a minimum and the MOB was able to resume regular operations.