FORSE - Fibre Optic Railway Sensing Equipment

Railways cost too much to maintain and put workers at risk while looking for track defects. Our proposal uses existing trackside assets in a new way that has the potential to do away with the need to send out workers onto the tracks looking for problems instead of solving them.

Railways are high-value national assets and are a critical part of national transport infrastructure globally. Around £9Bn is spent annually maintaining railway infrastructure to ensure safe and reliable operation -- with nearly £2B being used to locate and rectify defects. Over a million manhours were spent last year walking the track. This reliance on manual inspection and intervention puts workers in a risky environment and is not in keeping with the ambitions of the railway. Our proposed innovative solution will define and detect unique acoustic signatures using existing trackside fibre-optic cables and combines it with a novel system tracking train location to yield an automated always-on monitoring system that does away with the need to send workers onto a live railway to hunt for defects.

The FORSE project will develop and trial an innovative railway monitoring system designed to automate the detection of multiple defect types over large lengths of the network with low deployment costs compared to existing bespoke monitoring solution. Our novel concept will fuse distributed fibre-optic acoustic sensing data from trackside interrogators with train location and type data from onboard systems to generate new insights on track and train defects that cannot be detected from these systems in isolation. The resulting monitoring solution has the potential to significantly reduce the resource requirements for rail asset inspection allowing resource to be redirected and targeted towards fixing problems -- reducing safety risk for rail workers and improving asset value and availability.