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Track Geometry and maintenance
Measured Shovel packing - The traditional method of track maintenance was manual packing of ballast under the sleepers which involved packing 5-10 mm stone chippings below the sleepers to bring them up to level.. A gang of maintenance workers would move along the track and measure the amount of slack in a track section using a set of sighting boards, next they would strike the sleepers with a hammer to check for voided sleepers. Void meters were used to determine the amount of stone chippings needed to fill up the void and this was added to the stone chippings required for removing the slack in the track. The portion of track was lifted up using jacks and stones chips filled in under the sleepers approximately 400mm either side of the rail. It is claimed that vertical alignment could be corrected to an accuracy of a few millimeters using MSP. But the traditional, manual track improvement measures have become economically obsolete. Railways with heavy traffic, welded rails and concrete sleepers require mechanization of track maintenance to maintain minimum safety levels (Anderson and Mundrey 1995).