As a part of the infrastructural upgrades in preparation for the Fehmarn-Belt connection, the railway at Vordingborg is being expanded with an extra track. The current and older bridge that connects Vordingborg to the island of Masnedø was not robust enough for the new rail connection. As a result, a new bridge has been built to support the upcoming traffic. The new railway and bridge are expected to be open for traffic in the summer/fall 2019.

This video demonstrates how the new bridge has been built by Aarsleff and BaneDanmark

At the very beginning of this project, much focus was put on the monitoring of the rail because part of the construction work was carried out very close to the existing track. The track was planned to be open for traffic during the entire construction process.

The requirement was that the rail had to be measured between every train passage – which was about four times an hour. To comply to these requirements, Aarsleff Rail chose to install Railmonitors Condition Monitoring system.  The system measures every movement in the railway in real-time, sends data to the cloud and sends out warnings immediately when thresholds are exceeded. The alternative would have been to measure the railway with a crab or getting a surveyor to monitor the settlement of the railway.

In cooperation with Aarsleff Rail, Railmonitor developed a reporting function in the software which made it easy to inform implicated parts of the rail condition.

During the entire process, the monitoring system has been running with very few interruptions. Not even a layer of 20 centimeters of snow on top of the sensors had an impact on the system. With Railmonitors system, Aarsleff Rail was able to guarantee a safe railway for the passing trains. You can read more about the case here.

The monitoring project at Vordingborg is coming to an end. Aarsleff is already in the process of moving the system to a new project that demands a robust monitoring solution, . The Railmonitor system is easy to install, maintenance-free and that delivers measurements in real-time, benefiting the safety as well as the uptime of the railway.