Breaking down the barriers to more cross-industry remote condition monitoring (RCM)

There has been an increase in the use of `train monitoring train´ and `infrastructure monitoring infrastructure´ RCM systems over the last 5 years; which have demonstrated significant benefits. It can be more efficient to monitor some aspects of train condition from the line-side and to monitor some aspects of the condition of the infrastructure from passing trains. The use of these `cross-industry´ RCM systems have not shown the same wide uptake in their use. Previous RSSB research suggests that this is because of difficulties in setting up the technical and commercial arrangements for such initiatives which require collaboration between different railway partners, and for sharing the data. RSSB project T1010 has created template contracts that can be used when negotiating the commercial agreements for setting up cross-industry RCM systems, and started the development of a data-sharing architecture that can be used by those systems. This should make it easier to introduce new cross-industry RCM systems.