Walking Stick offers the following:

• Inspects the whole rail head surface in one pass .
• Audible warning of defects.
• Deepest defect per yard automatically reported and sized .
• Longitudinal position in miles and yards on rail recorded.
• Battery life in excess of 5 hours continuous use (easy swap).
• Automated export of inspection summary in Microsoft® Excel format.
• Import and archive of all inspection data on an office based system.

Comparison

The ACFM Walking Stick does not suffer from some of the problems of conventional ultrasonic inspection techniques where large numbers of defects can render a rail un-testable. With ACFM, the deeper the crack, the larger the response.

Use of the Walking Stick has many advantages, including:

• Use as a primary inspection tool on plain line inspection to determine the presence of surface breaking rail head defects.
• Categorising rail for assessing the maintenance strategy.
• Inspection before grinding to assess the amount of material removal.
• Post grinding inspection to confirm the removal of defects.
• Monitoring crack growth/re-growth to assess the effectiveness of maintenance strategies and machine grinding frequencies.