UIC and the Association of the European Rail Industry (UNIFE) have published a new railway specific Technical Recommendation (TecRec) which adds TecRec 200_001 on “Rail Reprofiling Management”.

A TecRec serves as a common comprehensive standard defined by UIC and UNIFE. It is recognised as voluntary sector standard with the aim of speeding up the administrative processes and thereby improving the competitiveness of the European railway system.

The new “Rail Reprofiling Management” TecRec provides a standard for railway infrastructure managers and other entities in charge of building and maintaining railway tracks. Rail reprofiling is defined in this document as rail rectification by using all state-of-the-art technologies such as grinding, milling, planing, and others.

The content of this standard has been prepared as a result of the outcomes of the European INNOTRACK infrastructure project, which was funded by the European Commission under the 7th framework programme for research and technological development. Its mission is to provide technically and economically verified solutions to drastically reduce costs in European rail track infrastructure.

This Technical Recommendation facilitates the management of rail head profiles and surface conditions. It covers control of corrugation, transverse profile and rolling contact fatigue, taking into account organisational and operational considerations. It describes how to manage rail reprofiling in order to maintain rails economically and how to move towards a preventive cyclic grinding strategy allowing rail service life to be prolonged and to reduce life cycle costs. In particular, fields of improvement such as specifications and logistics as well as recommendations for an optimised use of target profiles for grinding work are proposed.

The document can be downloaded free of charge from www.tecrec-rail.org

For more information on InnoTrack: http://www.innotrack.eu/