Keywords: track geometry, railway embankments, geotechnical instability, running standard deviation, slope failure, infrastructure maintenance.

Modern railway maintenance relies heavily on track geometry data to quantify structural health and ensure operational safety. Previous studies have indicated that track measurement data can be used to detect geotechnical instabilities in railway embankments and have suggested different metrics for this purpose. This study aims to evaluate the predictive capabilities of various metrics based on track measurement for three geotechnical failure cases in the Danish railway network. The selected cases are presenting different failure conditions, two slope failures and one time-dependent settlement. The metrics employed for the analysis are the running standard deviation and peak value for the longitudinal and the alignment, the differential standard deviation, and the embankment instability metric. The running standard deviation and amplitude are observed to increase prior to the development of the deeper slope failure. The settlement development can also be identified from the chronological plots. All the standard-stated metrics, however, remain below alert level limits as specified by code provisions. Our study highlights the potential to couple track measurement data with embankment instability, facilitating early detection of embankment failure and improving maintenance strategies.

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