A fast and non-destructive solution for inspecting railway ballast, SafeRailSystem (SRS) enables you to autonomously inspect railway ballast for renewal and maintenance.

This high-speed radar system (more than 300km/h) is made of three or four antennas and can be easily mounted on any rail carriage or locomotive safe rail system. SRS also offers:

• Continuous mapping of ballast thickness;
• Location of areas with poor bearing capacity (e.g. ballast pockets);
• Differentiation between clean and fouled ballast;
• Detection of drainage problems.

Other features of the system include:

• High speed: The SRS ground penetrating radar for ballast inspection can reach more than 300 km/h with 12 cm scanning steps.
• Dedicated post processing platform: Dedicated post processing software will guide the user through the interpretation of the data and detection of subsurface layers in a semi-automatic way.
• Video camera and GPS: The SRS solution can be integrated with a video camera, GPS and a Doppler radar encoder to provide the exact location of a scan and save time in post processing.

IDS’ innovative use of its SafeRailSystem means a reduction in the current cost of under track investigation, maintenance and renewal of ballast. This improvement in the specification of maintenance results in less reworking, a reliable calculation of investments, and an improvement of maintenance quality.

Benefits of SafeRailSystem include:

• Improved track maintenance decision making;
• Increased rail network management profitability due to continuous monitoring;
• Cost reductions in track investigation procedures, maintenance and renewal operations;
• Easy interpretation of ballast status through the use of automatic tools;
• Minimised survey time due to high-speed GPR solution