  This work describes a classifier designed to identify rail breakages in
double-track railway lines, completing the electronic equipment carried out by
authors. The main objective of this proposal is to guarantee the integrity of
tracks before the railway traffic starts working. In addition, it facilitates
maintenance tasks providing information about possible breakages. The detection
of breakages is based on the analysis of eight currents provided by the
electronic equipment, one per rail, at the ends of the section (emitting and
receiving nodes). The imbalance that occurs among the value of these currents
implies that there is at least a breakage in the track section under analysis.
This analysis is conducted according to three phases. The first one identifies
whether there is a breakage, and, in that case, the damaged track is
identified. The second phase provides information about which rail is broken
(internal, external or both of them) in the previously identified track.
Finally, if there is only one breakage, the third phase estimates its most
likely zone along the track section. This situation is considered as a
classification problem, and solved by means of the Principal Component Analysis
technique. This means that a significant number of measurements is required for
every breakage pattern (types of breakages) to be considered. Due to the
difficulty of having real data, the proposal has been validated using an
8km-long double-track hardware simulator specially designed by the authors,
with specific localizations for breakages.
