Railgrinder

[2] Transit systems and subways in major cities continue to use scheduled rail grinding processes to combat the corrugation common to heavily used tracks.

While it cannot reprofile rails like milling or other grinding trains, its working speed of approximately 80 km/h allows defect removal and prevention to be achieved with little or no impact on other scheduled traffic.

The ERICO Company manufactures hand-held rail grinders and drills for the railway industry as maintenance of way tools.

Grinding Quality Software is able to record and document measurements independently and provide a GQI rating for each rail on the track for before and after each pass on the grinder.

The advantage of using GQI software is the ability to produce post-grinding reports for later usage by planners to help further prioritize and monitor grinding profiles in the future.

The usage of GQI software also provides the ability to produce accurate assessments of rail grinder effectiveness in real-time which allows for work to be prioritized more efficiently and be executed in a timely manner.

The VibRisk model provides more specific risk assessments of vertebral endplate failure on individual lumbar levels taking into account driver posture.

The dynamic properties of different lines of the track can lead to varied degrees of rail corrugation through the use of high-speed wheel sets.

[7][8] One study indicates that the specific short-wave railroad deformity is mainly caused by pinned-pinned resonance, in which the rail vibrates as a fixed beam, as if pinned between periodically placed sleepers.

[9] Trains may vary speed on the tracks in an effort to prevent corrugation from affecting sections or rail on a transit systems.

[2] On subways and major transit systems, it is not possible to vary the direction of trains, making the use of annual and biennial rail grinding processes more applicable.

Roaring rail corrugation is a common reason for noise complaints in urban and suburban communities and is most prevalent when trains travel at moderate speed.

Short-pitch corrugation creates significantly more noise than normal railroad track friction, with a tone of about 500 to 800 hertz.

[9] Short-pitch corrugation is most commonly seen on railroads that do not experience regular rail grinding maintenance or that are rarely used.