Railway Infrastructure Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) analysis

Railways are an important transportation system enabling a connection between the manufacturing industries and the transportation sector and it helps a sustainable economy. Safe and secure operation in railway transportation is significant for passengers and freight transportation. It is obviously seen that there are negative consequences of railway accidents occurred in the world. For that reasons, European Union put into practice an European standard in 1999 known as EN 50126 to prevent these accidents and ensure a high safety rail operation system. EN 50126 standard aims to provide high secure and safe system for railways. The EN 50126 standard consists of the following concepts which are Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety (RAMS). These concepts are recognized as RAMS analyses and these analyses enable to do risk analyses to minimize these risks to the acceptable levels. In this study, a case study was performed for Uzbekistan Railways network. Uzbekistan Railways were established in 1994 and it is about 6464 kilometres length in total. There is also a high-speed line between Tashkent and Samarkand with 344 kilometres length. The maximum speed on the high-speed line is 250 km/h. The RAMS analysis techniques were used to evaluate the performance of maintenance and renewal works on Uzbekistan railway lines. The reliability analyses as well as availability, maintainability, and safety analyses were performed for the each type of railway track components after maintenance and renewal activities on the track.