A guideline for railway bridge inspection and condition assessment including the NDT toolbox

The member states of the European Union organise the regular inspection and condition assessment of their railway infrastructure asset on national level. Advanced non-destructive testing is not included as part of most regular railway bridge inspection rules. The paper presents a guideline foe inspection and condition assessment of railway bridges promoting especially non-destructive testing (NDT) methods. Besides the state of the art, the guideline summarises the latest steps of research, performed within the project Sustainable Bridges (SB) and documented as background documents. Based on the owners needs, the guidelines gives hints for application of NDT to all bridge types including subsoil and foundations. The guideline proposes, how to implement the refined non-destructive inspection tools for concrete bridges, metal and masonry arch bridges. For the use by bridge owners decision makers or inspectors during inspections the bridge defect catalogue and the NDT toolbox with one page information about the available non-destructive testing techniques should be useful.Comissão Europeia (CE)