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The primary mission of the Federal Railroad
Administration (FRA) is to ensure railroad safety. To accomplish
this, we set and enforce safety standards, investigate major
train accidents, and assist the rail industry in training
its workforce on safety laws. To provide a balanced transportation
system, the FRA Office of Safety Assurance and Compliance,
is responsible for inspecting, monitoring and directing safety
improvements at grade crossings, railroad trackage and railroad
cars operating over the nation’s general transportation
system.
The national deployment of the Automated Track Inspection
Program (ATIP), track geometry car serves an important
role in FRA’s overall compliance programs. The Office
of Safety objective is to conduct safe, accurate, and efficient
surveys with the foci to develop a comprehensive automated
inspection supplement that may eventually go beyond manual
inspection imprecision by improving the method and practice
of measuring substandard track conditions.
ATIP’s function is to minimize the risk of a passenger
or catastrophic hazardous material accident/incident by continuously
improving the geometry car's operational efficiency, insuring
measured and recorded values accurately represent track conditions,
and timely distributing track geometry information to FRA
headquarters, regional management, and respective railroad
personnel (Figure 1).
The primary safety-related use of ATIP is the assistance
provided to FRA inspectors in identifying the most important
track locations and conditions for them to evaluate. Key to
ATIP’s safety success is the advance detection of potential
accident-causing hazards and the appropriate basis for inspectors
to impose and safeguard rail transportation with compulsory
operational and maintenance remediation.
FRA’s track geometry survey car (DOTX 216) helps
America’s railroads increase safety and keep pace with
advancing technology. The data, produced by the car through
the precise measurement of existing track systems, are used
to monitor compliance with federal safety standards and aid
in the efficient, effective track system maintenance planning
to support the engineering of today’s energy efficient,
high speed railroads.
FRA relies on ATIP data as a primary tool for headquarter
and regional managers to; (1) monitor and assess railroad
compliance with the Federal Track Safety Standards (FTSS),
(2) evaluate, as an early indicator of the safety trends within
the industry, and (3) create a centralized Track Data Management
System (TDMS) archive to support special safety studies, including
accident/incident investigations, congressional, and public
requests. Additionally, the TDMS database maybe used to set
priorities for enforcement activities, compliance agreements,
perform quality assurance checks for the geometry car
and to evaluate the effect of proposed changes in the FTSS.
The onboard measurement and geographic reference systems
also make ATIP a valuable tool for the inventory of track
structures (e.g., turnouts, at grade railroad crossings and
highway-rail crossing’s locations), exception analyses,
and convenient access to historical data for particular-surveyed
railroad.
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