Boston, MA

Transit agencies are under increasing pressure to meet State of Good Repair (SGR), Transit Asset Management (TAM), and National Transit Database (NTD) requirements while managing aging infrastructure, limited budgets, and workforce shortages.

This session explores how agencies can move beyond compliance by using SGR, TAM, and NTD data to make better maintenance decisions. We'll review FTA requirements, discuss practical approaches to Transit Asset Management, examine NTD reporting considerations, and demonstrate how connecting inspections, condition assessments, work orders, and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems helps agencies improve asset visibility, prioritize maintenance, and support regulatory compliance.

Passenger Railroads today face ever increasing pressure to balance infrastructure performance, maintenance costs, asset life, and safety. Let's explore how rail milling complements preventative grinding and rail replacement strategies, providing infrastructure owners with another option for addressing severe rail defects and restoring rail profiles.

Using real-world examples, operational experience, and economic modeling, attendees will learn where milling delivers the greatest value and how it can help extend rail life while reducing overall maintenance expenditures. The session will provide practical guidance for selecting the right maintenance approach based on your situation.

Transit agencies today are being asked to do more with less while facing workforce shortages, limited track access, aging infrastructure, and increasing pressure to maintain assets in a State of Good Repair. Traditional inspection and maintenance practices built around manual inspections and periodic measurements can no longer fully meet the demands of modern rail transit systems. As a result, the industry has steadily evolved toward automated inspection, machine vision, wayside monitoring, and advanced analytics to improve safety, reliability, and maintenance effectiveness.

This session will explore how integrating track inspection, vehicle dynamics, wheel condition, and wayside monitoring data can provide a more complete understanding of wheel-rail interaction and asset condition. Attendees will learn how modern inspection technologies, automation, and emerging decision-support capabilities are helping agencies identify issues earlier, prioritize maintenance activities, reduce the need for field inspections, and move toward more intelligent, condition-based asset management.

The ARGUS Portable Track Inspector is a plug-and-play track geometry and rail profile measurement system that deploys from any hitch-equipped hi-rail — including hi-rail-equipped ATVs, UTVs, and small pickups. A dual non-contact encoder and fully embedded processing eliminate wheel-mounted hardware and external computing: the pod mounts to a standard hitch receiver, draws power from the hitch outlet with no vehicle modification, and installs or removes in about a minute. At under 50 lb it can be carried, mounted, and operated by one person, and moved in a travel case between vehicles, territories, or properties.

Because it occupies only the hitch and one power connection, it leaves the rest of a small vehicle free for other inspection technologies — rail flaw detection, right-of-way and rail surface cameras, LiDAR scanning, ground penetrating radar — so a single low-cost platform can carry several inspection layers in one pass instead of requiring a separate vehicle and crew for each.

ARGUS measures more than 50 chord-based and space-curve geometry channels alongside rail profile data, with parameters and defect classification configurable to FRA 49 CFR Part 213, Transport Canada Rules Respecting Track Safety, and EN 13848-1 definitions, and supports attended, heads-up alerting, and unattended autonomous operation. The session covers the measurement approach, multilayer deployment on small vehicles, and applications in yards, industrial track, and constrained transit environments.