Improving Procedures for Maintaining Existing Railway Station Infrastructure in Poland as an Element of the Sustainable European Ecological Transformation

Railways play a key role in sustainable development, being one of the most ecological means of transport. The article discusses the challenges and opportunities related to the maintenance of the railway station infrastructure in Poland, in the context of modern predictive technologies. The Eurail FP3 project, implemented under a European Union grant, focuses on the development of the modern solutions for the maintenance of railway infrastructure, including the possibility of using a modern approach to monitoring the technical condition of buildings in real time, which allows for the prediction of faults and the optimization of the maintenance work. The authors of the article analyze the data obtained from the main manager of the railway infrastructure in Poland regarding the station maintenance procedures and present a new approach for a maintenance procedure, which assumes the inclusion of predictive technologies. Thanks to this, it is possible to optimize the maintenance processes of the station infrastructure, which in the long term will affect the possibility of the current access to data on the condition of buildings in real time and will affect the operating costs related to the maintenance of the station facilities, as well as limiting the negative impact on the environment. The analysis carried out as part of the completed works has also revealed the threats and difficulties related to the costs and technological limitations related to the implementation of the maintenance policy, while indicating the directions of further works to ensure the proper efficiency of the railway infrastructure.