William PoolIndustrial automation & IT/OT convergence
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03MESEA · high-speed line

Railway track temperature monitoring

Standalone rail-temperature measurement under live operating conditions, turned into real-time dashboards and alerts before thermal drift becomes a problem.

  • EdgeRaspberry Pi nodes
  • TransportMQTT
  • Alertingthreshold rules
RoleEdge hardware, data pipeline and supervision
ContextMESEA · high-speed line
Stack
  • Raspberry Pi
  • Python
  • MQTT
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Linux (Debian)
  • MariaDB
  • Proxmox VE
  • Node Exporter
  1. 01Rail sensorstemperature
  2. 02Edge nodeRaspberry Pi · Python
  3. 03MQTT brokercentral
  4. 04Prometheusstorage · rules
  5. 05Grafanadashboards · alerts
Fig. 03.1 — Measurement chain

Why it matters

Rail temperature is a key input for track maintenance: large swings put continuously welded rail under thermal stress. Maintenance teams need trends and thresholds, not occasional readings taken by hand.

Edge acquisition

  • Raspberry Pi edge nodes with temperature sensors, installed and running on a live line.
  • Measurements published over MQTT; collectors buffer locally and reconnect on their own when the link drops.

Supervision

  • Central broker feeding Prometheus, with Grafana dashboards for live values and trends.
  • Threshold alerts for thermal drift instead of manual checks after the fact.
  • The infrastructure itself is monitored too, so a silent sensor is noticed as quickly as a hot rail.

Supervision node

The whole chain runs on a dedicated Proxmox node: MQTT ingestion from a fleet of ten temperature sensors, measurements historised in MariaDB, Grafana for visualisation, and Prometheus with Node Exporter watching the node itself.

Grafana dashboard
Grafana dashboard: 24 hours of temperature readings, with min / mean / max per sensor.

Network & security

  • Dedicated, secured network: VLAN segmentation, firewall rules and VPN access.
  • Supervision services virtualised on Proxmox rather than installed on the field hardware.
Proxmox node layout
Proxmox node layout: NAT VM, NTP server and transfer VM in front; LXC containers for Grafana, MQTT, MariaDB and Prometheus on an isolated bridge.

Delivery

Developed autonomously and end to end — from the Raspberry Pi prototype (Python, Shell) to the network and the virtualised services — and handed over with installation and operating files written to standardise IT / OT practice.

The result is a self-contained, documented system: reliable real-time tracking, with proactive alerting instead of manual checks after the fact.