Rail and Train Noise Monitoring

Controlling and monitoring railway and train noise in residential and urban areas is a critical function of a railway. The noise generated can be dependent upon the engine, rail cars, rail construction, train speed, and the horn. Modern high speed trains have also created new levels of high frequency noise that create an acoustic disturbance that sounds like an aircraft going by.

Larson Davis offers a family of noise monitoring systems with power, communication, and sound recording options that can be implemented to suit the needs of many railway functions including:

• Designing and evaluating noise abatements
• Acceptance testing of rail car or railway modifications
• Noise source or event detection
• Measurements in railway and stations areas
• Evaluation of noise regulation compliance

Applications

• Transportation Noise Monitoring
• Railway Noise Monitoring
• Train Noise Monitoring
• Tram Noise Monitoring
• Subway Noise Monitoring
• Trolley Noise Monitoring

Permanent, Portable, or Attended Monitoring Systems

Permanent monitoring systems can be used to acquire data 24/7 and make operational adjustments as needed. Our portable monitoring systems can be deployed rapidly for specific studies over shorter periods of time and can be easily moved from one data acquisition site to another. These systems come with weather resistant enclosures and outdoor microphone options. Our hand held sound level meters can be used for on-site evaluation and logging of noise levels.

Larson Davis permanent, portable, or attended monitoring systems have options that are critical for successful railway monitoring, including:

• Weather data acquisition (including wind speed, wind direction, temperature, humidity, and rain fall)
• GPS positioning to log survey locations
• Exceedance detection that will identify when a defined noise limit is reached.
• Sound recording (.wav) for listening to events and determining the sources that cause the exceedances
• Automatic storage of data to USB flash drive
• Web publishing, emails/SMS alerts, and remote communication
• Complete set of metrics (including octave and third octave filters to 6.3 Hz, frequency weightings, time weightings, Ln percentiles, and community noise calculations: Lden & CNEL, and more)
• Tonality metric for calculating annoyance of tones.