Summary:
The GPR investigation has been carried out along the two stretches of length 95 m and 155 m
on platform no. 12 at Chatrapati Shivaji terminus Railway station, Mumbai to inspect the
railway ballast. The objective of the survey was to map the possible scrap material eg. rail
piece, concrete block, Optical fiber cables, signal transmitting cables and other metallic and
non-metallic object material in the ballast using GPR. It has been observed that during the
screening of ballast using the Ballast cleaning machine, the presence of scrap in the ballast
hinder the capacity of the machine as well as hampers the further screening work resulting in
very less output than expected. Moreover, it does damage the existing cables which lead to
great damage to the overall functioning of the railway system. Therefore, through this survey,
the ability of GPR to map the scrap non-destructively has been explored so that, the possible
scrap can be removed manually or the damage to the cables can be avoided, hence improving
the efficiency of the ballast cleaning machine. A customized data collection mechanism was developed specifically for smooth movement of GPR system over railway tracks.
The GPR survey was carried out followed by BCM operation. The output of the GPR survey were
found to be 100% accurate in practical scenarios as well.