Assessing the potential cost savings of introducing the maintenance option of ‘Economic Tyre Turning’ in Great Britain railway wheelsets

This paper assesses the potential cost savings of introducing a maintenance option known as ‘Economic Tyre Turning’ (ETT) in railway wheelset maintenance in Great Britain. It first develops a life-cycle cost model and puts forward a Monte Carlo simulation procedure to assess the life-cycle costs of different maintenance strategies, including ETT. This Monte Carlo simulation procedure samples from statistical degradation models that estimate the evolution of wear and damage trajectories of different wheelsets, and the maintenance impact of wheel turning in the loss of diameter in a more realistic manner by controlling random effects related to unit, vehicle and month of measurement. The main findings suggest that ETT may provide potential savings of around 0.8% up to 4.4% when compared to a simple wheelset renewal strategy, and between 2.0% and 4.7% cost savings when ETT is used in association with more complex strategies.