Heavy-haul railways are critical for transporting freight. However, prolonged wheel–rail interactions cause frequent rail defects, particularly in small-radius curve sections. Ultrasonic amplitude scan (A-scan) signals are essential for the nondestructive testing of internal rail defects. In real heavy-haul environments, these signals suffer from strong non-Gaussian coupled noise. Such noise includes structural noise, low-frequency irrelevant components, and high-frequency electrical noise. Noise aliasing obscures defect echoes and increases the risk of missed detections. Conventional denoising methods are limited by poor noise–signal separability, mode mixing, and inadequate adaptability to complex non-Gaussian signals. To address these challenges, an A-scan signal model under noise coupled conditions was constructed by analyzing the statistical and time–frequency characteristics of different noise components. Based on this model, a multi feature fusion filtering framework was developed within the ideal binary mask (IBM) paradigm. This framework was designed to enhance defect echo extraction from ultrasonic A-scan signals under strong non-Gaussian interference. Tests on field inspection data showed that the proposed method effectively suppressed coupled noise and achieved accurate extraction of defect echoes.

The fault diagnosis of railway point machines (RPMs) has attracted the attention of engineers and researchers. Seldom have studies considered diverse noises along the track. To fulfill this aspect, a multi-time-scale variational mode decomposition (MTSVMD) is proposed in this paper to realize the accurate and robust fault diagnosis of RPMs under multiple noises. MTSVMD decomposes condition monitoring signals after coarse-grained processing in varying degrees. In this manner, the information contained in the signal components at multiple time scales can construct a more abundant feature space than at a single scale. In the experimental validation, a random position, random type, random number, and random length (4R) noise-adding algorithm helps to verify the robustness of the approach. The adequate experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed MTSVMD-based fault diagnosis.

The pressure data of the train air braking system is of great significance to accurately evaluate its operation state. In order to overcome the influence of sensor fault on the pressure data of train air braking system, it is necessary to design a set of sensor fault-tolerant voting mechanism to ensure that in the case of a pressure sensor fault, the system can accurately identify and locate the position of the faulty sensor, and estimate the fault data according to other normal data. A fault-tolerant mechanism based on multi-classification support vector machine (SVM) and adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is introduced. Multi-classification SVM is used to identify and locate the system fault state, and ANFIS is used to estimate the real data of the fault sensor. After estimation, the system will compare the real data of the fault sensor with the ANFIS estimated data. If it is similar, the system will recognize that there is a false alarm and record it. Then the paper tests the whole mechanism based on the real data. The test shows that the system can identify the fault samples and reduce the occurrence of false alarms.

With rising energy prices and concerns about environmental issues, energy-efficient driving strategies (EEDS) for high-speed trains have received a substantial amount of attention. In particular, energy-saving schemes play a huge role in reducing the energy and operating costs of trains. This article studies the EEDS of high-speed trains at a given time. A well-posed model is formulated, in which the constraints of the checkpoints, in addition to the speed limits, vehicle dynamics, and discrete control throttle, are first considered. For a given control sequence, the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions are used to obtain the necessary conditions for an EEDS. According to several key equations of the necessary conditions, the checkpoint constraints are satisfied. Some case studies are conducted based on the data of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed line to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

As one of the most important railway signaling equipment, railway point machines undertake the major task of ensuring train operation safety. Thus fault diagnosis for railway point machines becomes a hot topic. Considering the advantage of the anti-interference characteristics of vibration signals, this paper proposes an novel intelligent fault diagnosis method for railway point machines based on vibration signals. A feature extraction method combining variational mode decomposition (VMD) and multiscale fluctuation-based dispersion entropy is developed, which is verified a more effective tool for feature selection. Then, a two-stage feature selection method based on Fisher discrimination and ReliefF is proposed, which is validated more powerful than single feature selection methods. Finally, support vector machine is utilized for fault diagnosis. Experiment comparisons show that the proposed method performs best. The diagnosis accuracies of normal-reverse and reverse-normal switching processes reach 100% and 96.57% respectively. Especially, it is a try to use new means for fault diagnosis on railway point machines, which can also provide references for similar fields.

Railway Point System (RPS) is an important infrastructure in railway industry and its faults may have significant impacts on the safety and efficiency of train operations. For the fault diagnosis of RPS, most existing methods assume that sufficient samples of each failure mode are available, which may be unrealistic, especially for those modes of low occurrence frequency but with high risk. To address this issue, this work proposes a novel fault diagnosis method that only requires the power signals generated under normal RPS operations in the training stage. Specifically, the failure modes of RPS are distinguished through constructing a reasoning diagram, whose nodes are either binary logic problems or those that can be decomposed into the problems of the binary logic. Then, an unsupervised method for the signal segmentation and a fault detection method are combined to make decisions for each binary logic problem. Based on the results of decisions, the diagnostic rules are established to identify the failure modes. Finally, the data collected from multiple real-world RPSs are used for validation and the results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the benchmark in identifying the faults of RPSs.