Electrical resistance is among the characteristics that fastening systems must meet to ensure the proper functioning of signaling systems in railway infrastructure. The EN 13146-5:2012 standard specifies a laboratory testing method for determining the electrical resistance under wet conditions between running rails provided by a fastening system on steel or concrete sleepers. In urban railway tracks, the electrical resistance of fastening systems affects the stray current; however, there is no standardized electrical resistance measuring method. There is also no definition for the minimum value that the electrical resistance of fastening systems must satisfy to prevent stray currents. For this reason, this paper analysis the possibility of using the standard EN 13146-5:2012 for the measurement and analysis of the electrical resistance of fastening systems in urban railway tracks. In this study, the electrical resistance of different fastening systems used in urban railway tracks was measured. Based on the tests results, the modifications needed in the EN 13146-5 standard for it to be suitable for urban railway tracks were identified. The proposed modifications include the use of a DC current source. The test should be performed on a rail sample fastened to the concrete base, and the current circuit should be closed by the reference electrode installed in the base. Spraying water from nozzles is not applicable for this measurement. The test should be performed under dry conditions and at different water levels (water on the top of the concrete base and on the top of the levelling layer). Different water levels were used to simulate the most common conditions in urban railway tracks built as part of the road surface, where the track-drying process is very slow. The test should not be performed when the rails are immersed in water, because the current flows directly from the rail into the water in such case, and the fastening system has no influence on the measured electrical resistance value. In addition to describing the proposed changes, the calculation of the minimum electrical resistance value that fastening systems in urban railway tracks must satisfy is also presented.

Rail corrugation and roughness represent typical irregularities on railway and tramway tracks, which cause increased dynamic forces, high-frequency vibrations, reduced riding comfort, shorter track lifespan, higher maintenance costs, and increased noise levels. Roughness and corrugation can be measured by evaluating the unevenness of the rail longitudinal running surface, which can be conducted using handheld devices or trolleys (directly on the track). Alternatively, vehicle or track-based indirect methods offer practical solutions for determining the condition of the rail running surface. This paper presents a methodology for rail corrugation and roughness evaluation, using bogie frame vibration data from an instrumented in-service tramway vehicle operating on Zagreb’s tramway network. Furthermore, it investigates the effects of various factors on the evaluation method, including wheel roughness, lateral positioning, signal processing methods, horizontal geometry, wheel–rail contact force, and tramway vehicle vibroacoustic characteristics. It was concluded that a simplified methodology that did not include transfer functions or wheel roughness measurements yielded relatively good results for evaluating rail corrugation and roughness across several wavelength bands. To improve the presented methodology, future research should assess the vehicle’s vibroacoustic characteristics with experimental hammer impact tests, measure the influence of wheel roughness on wheel–rail contact and bogie vibrations, and refine the measurement campaign by increasing test runs, limiting speed variation, and conducting controlled tests.

Urban tram track infrastructure, particularly switches and crossings (S&C), is subject to rapid, unevenly distributed wear, yet condition assessment still primarily relies on manual inspection, which can be slow, costly, and unsafe. Vibration-based monitoring methods are a viable alternative but have mostly been developed for mainline railway lines rather than the specific geometries of urban tram networks and typically depend on costly labelled wear data. This paper presents the URITMIS methodology, which uses vibroacoustic data recorded by an inertial measurement system (IMS) mounted on an in-service tram, with the goal of assessing S&C wear without requiring wear labels during training. A self-supervised contrastive 1D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) encoder, conditioned with Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) and a gradient-reversal adversary to suppress confounds, was trained separately on data from 133 switches and 75 crossings, collected over one year of in-service monitoring. Wear risk scores were computed based on embedding anomalies and validated against manual wear measurements from 28 switches and 14 crossings. The final model achieved a moderate wear-rank correlation for crossings (ρ = 0.631) and a weak yet statistically significant correlation for switches (ρ = 0.311). The results demonstrate that self-supervised vibration embeddings can support reliable, scalable, and label-free prioritisation of S&C maintenance.