RailCheck

Key advantages

• Finds surface cracks in the rail head, including head checks (fine cracks caused by wheel contact) on the gauge corner and face.
• Push it at walking pace to check the rail continuously.
• Audible and visual alarms, with the complete inspection recorded for later analysis.
• Rugged, collapsible and self-contained trolley carried easily to site.
• Set up in a few minutes by a single operator.
• Needs no couplant, so it avoids the uneven results ultrasonic testing (UT) can give on rail.
• Rail probes are equally applicable to wheels, axles and other rolling stock.

Overview

The RailCheck is an ETher NDE hand-held dual frequency eddy current flaw detector modified for rail inspection. Mounted on the FILUS EC-1 single-rail trolley, it uses a unique Widescan rail probe shaped to follow the top and gauge faces of the rail. The probe is held at a nominal 1mm gap by adjustable rollers, while sprung Diablo wheels and a floating mechanism keep it correctly oriented regardless of the trolley position. A rotary encoder provides distance information.

Simple operation

Setup is a calibration against a known-size slot in a test piece. The trolley is placed on the rail, the probe block lowered, the system automatically balanced on a clean section of rail, the distance counter reset and recording started. Data can be shown as a strip chart, a vector display, or both simultaneously.

Rail probes can also be used directly with an ETher NDE portable flaw detector, or coupled to a manual or automatic trolley with I/O and data logging, for a low-cost way to find rolling contact fatigue (cracking caused by wheels rolling over the rail).

Key specifications

Parameter	Value
Instrument	ETher NDE RailCheck (IRAL001)
Frequency	Dual frequency, 10Hz – 12.8MHz
Gain	-18 to +100dB in 0.1, 1 and 6dB steps
Probe modes	Absolute, bridge, reflection, conductivity, rotary
Display	5.7” (145mm) daylight readable colour