Genesis Electronics Group, Inc. announced that it will be building bleeding-edge rail inspection and safety testing technology within its Glider units, allowing the transmission of critical safety data back to Glid operators and railroad owners. In pursuit of commitment to safety, Genesis Electronics Group would like to announce one of the key features provided in Glider units. Each unit pair will be equipped with rail inspection capabilities allowing for the ability to detect rail defects by inspecting track condition rail profile, and other hazards using NDE/T (Non-Destructive Evaluation/Test) technology and methods.

The system is comprised of high-quality point-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera systems and 3DLOC software which enables the Glider to geotag data during the inspection and download it directly to Glid's database as a part of GLaaS (Glider-as-a-Service) product offering. This allows the Glider to inspect the rail and track as it traverses to its destination, while providing a comprehensive report on its findings to the customer and the rail owner as a part of the service which will enable each to plan outages more precisely and efficiently, resulting in reduced down time and lost revenue. Traditionally, rail tracks are inspected by human inspectors and/or manually operated machines called track recording vehicles (TRVs).

When the process is conducted by human inspectors, it requires them to walk along tracks and conduct measurements manually using track gauge meters coupled with visual surveys. This kind of inspection is labor-intensive (subjecting the inspector to bad weather conditions), time-consuming, costly, dangerous, and offers discrete information and subjective results. When using TRVs or inspection trolleys, the rail inspection is conducted requiring at least two human inspectors present.

Given the high cost of the equipment and labor associated to run the test, most tracks may not be inspected frequently enough to identify potential safety hazards. With Gliders, rail can be inspected each time the Glider goes down the track, so that manual or more thorough inspections and repairs can be made.