Method and system for compensating for wheel wear on a train

DETAILED DESCRIPTION The present invention meets the aforementioned need to a great extent by providing a method and system for compensating for wheel wear in which wheel rotation information from a revolution counter or a tachometer and position and/or speed information from an independent positioning system such as GPS or INS are measured over a predetermined distance and used to determine the size of the train wheels.
This process is performed periodically to compensate for wheel wear.
In one aspect of the invention, the system includes a map database and the position information from the independent positioning system is used to as an index to ensure that the rotation data used for the speed/position comparison between the position system and rotation data is collected in an area of straight and flat track so as to exclude errors in the rotation data caused by wheel slippage and turns.
In another aspect of the invention, the data used for the comparison between the speeds/distances indicated by the positioning system and by the rotation data is collected over a long distance to minimize known errors in the positioning system.