Open-Source Hardware and Software for a Laboratory-Scale Track and Moving Vehicle Actuation System Used for Indirect Broken Rail Detection

There is an urgent need to better understand vehicle-rail interaction dynamics to pave the way for more consistent and automated rail crack detection methodologies, as opposed to relying on periodic and manual detection via track circuits or dedicated track geometry cars. Designing an open-source hardware framework for a lab-scale rail testbed would open the doors to further data collection and analysis needed to understand the dynamic response of cracked rails. We present a framework and the corresponding open-source hardware and software (published to GitHub) for developing a laboratory-scale motorized railroad testbed, with a vehicle that is modularly tuned to the dynamics of an in-service rail car.