New eye-catching railway inspection train to debut in Japan

A Japanese railway operator has developed a new inspection train, Big Eye, featuring headlights that resemble a pair of eyeballs, aiming to streamline its maintenance work with digitalized functions. Kyushu Railway Co. will hold test runs from this month through next March in southwestern Japan before its full-fledged debut to evaluate the equipment's durability, accuracy of data measurement and for building a system for data analysis, it said. While the conventional maintenance relies largely on visual inspection, the Big Eye is equipped with laser sensors and cameras to detect track distorti...