How are you currently managing your assets? In this piece we’ll jump into managing railway assets and best practices as well as some thoughts on the bad practices. Railway assets are complex pieces of equipment that must be properly maintained to ensure safety, efficiency, and overall operations are carried out without impacting service delivery.
This inventory is a great place to start because it allows complete visualization of everything. Each asset has a life cycle and to maximize that life cycle, a proper catalog of information for the assets is necessary.
An example of minimum requirements to support asset management and capital planning are displayed in the table below.
Don’t collect the bare minimum of data for rail assets.
While certain components of the asset are not required to be kept track of for the purpose of inspections and maintenance, the more information collected on the assets only gives more data to better analyze the asset to benefit decision making such as when to rehab or replace the asset. This information will be paramount to planning and justifying capital improvements. The table below is an example of how proper asset management aids capital planning efforts.