Real-Time Position and Speed Monitoring of Trains Using Phase-Sensitive OTDR

It is essential to carry out real-time position and speed monitoring of trains to ensure the safety of railway operation. In this letter, the phase-sensitive optical-time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) is demonstrated to overcome the drawbacks of the track circuit, which is widely used and has the risk to be damaged by lightening, for the first time. A long sensing cable, buried nearby to two parallel railways, is used to detect the vibration signals generated by trains with Φ-OTDR and the real-time vibration signals of the trains are extracted/quantified by wavelet denoising. With the edge detection by normalized sliding variance, the operation status of two nearby trains, including their relative position and speed, are obtained over a 10.2-km measurement length in real time. This letter offers a new passive way for safety monitoring of railway operation.