Using state-of-the-art imaging technology, Aurora® scans your tracks to reveal the exact condition of every tie and every component along the way. It pinpoints any potential problems and marks their exact location so you can plan ahead to repair them in the most efficient way possible.
Wood Tie Grading. Aurora assigns one of four grades to each and every wood tie based on more than 20 variables, including plate cut, surface roughness, decay and cracks. Grading can be customized to your railroad’s standards and used to generate detailed compliance reports and tie cluster analysis.
Concrete Tie Inspection. Over time, Rail Seat Deterioration (RSD) can cause a crosstie to no longer support and restrain the rail. Aurora uses advanced shape recognition to identify RSD and pad wear, as well as the condition of fasteners and insulators.
Rail Base Corrosion Assessment. Chipping, cracking and splitting are usually telltale signs of Rail Base Corrosion (RBC), most commonly found in tunnels. Aurora can assess the severity of RBC by continuously measuring the width of the rail base and assigning a grade to the severity.
To date, Aurora has scanned more than a million ties and assigned milepost coordinates, GPS coordinates and tie grade information to every individual tie. All of that information gets simplified down into easy-to-understand reports customized to your railway’s specific needs. They’ll let you know when ties degrade, when fasteners have failed, where rail base corrosion is occurring and many other factors that can impact the safety and efficiency of your rails. You can quickly and easily pinpoint any potential problems so you can plan ahead to repair them in the most efficient way possible.
Aurora can also help ensure you’re in line with industry regulations. Detailed compliance reports will confirm that you have at least the minimum number of effective wood ties in a segment, uncover defective rail joints and check for rail seat deterioration exceptions in concrete ties.
Aurora uses a combination of cameras and lidar to generate a high-resolution 3-D image of your track. That advanced technology finds flaws manual detection methods may not and does it in far faster way – traveling down your rails at up to 42 miles per hour. The newly developed Aurora Xi™, a sister product to Aurora, adds backscatter technology to scans, allowing you to see below the surface of track components to find problems you can’t see with the naked eye – like hollow or decayed regions in wood ties that compromise their ability to hold a spike.