The control of corrosion and erosion damages is one of the essential engineering tasks solving of which ensures the long performance of the objects and constructions. Moreover, despite all the measures taken to increase the corrosion resistance of materials, control and monitoring of appearance and development of corrosion and erosion damages remains one of the most important elements of the Risk Based Engineering. These tasks are relevant for almost all major industries: nuclear, thermal and hydropower, chemical and petrochemical industries, oil and gas, piping, naval, railway and automotive transport, and others.

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Nowadays, the scores of continuous rails testing technologies are represented on the European, American, Australian and other markets – portable single- and dual-rail line trolleys, locomobiles and detector-cars. In most of them traditional sounding schemes are implemented that allow to test the rail head and the rail central cross-section

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Rails are one of the most important and, at the same time, most stressed elements of the railroad transport and metropolitan, since they are particularly exposed to the loading caused by the rolling stock as well as the dynamic loading. Due to the increased speed of the trains for the last years, and the increment loading of the freight cars, the development of service, fatigue-type defects in the place of contact of the train wheel with the rail head surface may occur. These are so-called “Rolling contact fatigue” (RCF) defects.

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Both the manufacture defects – the ones that appear in the process of production – and in-service defects of fatigue type may develop (fig.1) in various metal products. The cracks may develop at different angles to the surface growing to considerable depths thus causing the threat of a product breaking when in service.

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This article is dedicated to:

• what kinds of surface defects are the most frequent in rails and can lead to their breakage;
• which testing techniques are applied for detection of the same; analysis of effectiveness;
• what kind of NDT equipment allows to most accurately detect the described rail defects.

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Welds are the most common type of permanent joints in all industrial sectors. There are many types of welds both in terms of welding methods (manual electric arc, automatic or semi-automatic, submerged arc, gas-shielded arc, electrical resistance welding, etc.), and in terms of joint configurations (butt, fillet, tee, lap welds). However, in most cases, irrespective of the welding method, welded joints are subject to quality testing at the end of welding. Flaw inspection is aimed at identifying various defects that lead to a weakened weld strength or poor leak tightness. Timely detection of such flaws significantly affects the determination of service life of a whole welded structure. The weld quality is particularly critical for high pressure vessels and systems, as well as for load-bearing structures.

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One of the rail track ultrasonic testing (UT) features compared to the UT of another objects of the railroad transport is its multi-channeling at a variety of sounding schemes, and a large extension of the TO. As a result of this particular feature, it is more challenging for the operator to seize such volume of information in real time – the testing by the single-rail trolley UDS2-77 and double-rail trolleys UDS2-73, as a rule, is performed at a speed of 3-4 km/h – the operator's walking speed.

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The strength, quality and reliability of rails during their operation is crucial for the railway industry.

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