ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mech. Eng.
Sec. Mechatronics
This article is part of the Research TopicTechnical Briefs in Mechanical Engineering: Volume 2View all articles
Design and Testing of an Intelligent Anti-Runaway Rail-Shoe Control System
Provisionally accepted
Jun Shi*
zongfang Zhang- Xi’an Railway Vocational & Technical Institute, Xi'an, China
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Conventional anti-runaway rail shoes (wheel chocks) used for rail vehicles are difficult to monitor in real time, labor-intensive to operate, and prone to operational errors such as incorrect placement/removal and missed placement/removal. To address these limitations, this paper presents an intelligent anti-runaway rail-shoe control system. A visual monitoring platform is installed in the locomotive cab and in the control rooms of marshalling yards and section stations, providing real-time status indication for rail-shoe management. Compared with traditional rail shoes, the proposed system wirelessly transmits key state information— such as on-rail status, wheel-contact (loaded) status, and lock status—to the monitoring platform. In addition, an active light-emitting alarm helps operators quickly locate installed shoes, thereby reducing the likelihood of missed placement/removal. Functional tests were conducted with reference to railway rail-shoe management requirements and representative field operating scenarios. The results demonstrate that the proposed system meets the requirements for on-site railway anti-runaway operations.
Keywords: Anti-runaway device, Pseudo-duplex communication, rail vehicles, Smart rail shoe, System testing and evaluation
Received: 03 Jan 2026; Accepted: 29 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Shi and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jun Shi
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