Swiss Federal Railways has chosen Hexagon’s CALIPRI X for a nationwide rollout of automated wheelset measurement, building on more than a decade of partnership with the CALIPRI range.
Hexagon has landed its largest order to date. The manufacturer has signed a contract worth more than €5 million with Swiss Federal Railways Passenger Services (SBB Personenverkehr), an individual division of SBB, for its renowned CALIPRI X automated wheelset measurement systems. These will be installed at depots across Switzerland, spanning the country’s German, French and Italian speaking regions.
Swiss Federal Railways Passenger Services (SBB Personenverkehr), an individual division of SBB, has placed an order worth more than €5 million for CALIPRI X automated wheelset measurement systems from Hexagon. These will be installed at depots across Switzerland, covering the country’s German, French and Italian speaking regions.
The systems will need to operate under a wide range of geographical conditions and climates, from the colder winters around Lake Constance, Zurich and Winterthur to the significantly milder Mediterranean-influenced climate of Ticino.
They will be installed in depots based in major cities along with other key hubs across the Swiss rail network — a strategic distribution that ensures the systems cover the country’s entire rail network.
Precision Measurement, Automated
Hexagon specialises in the development and distribution of optical measurement systems for high-precision profile wear measurement of wheels, rails and tracks. Its CALIPRI non-contact profile measurement devices are based on laser light section technology, thus ensuring highly accurate and reproducible measured data.
The CALIPRI X is a fully automated on-track wheelset measurement system designed for drive-through use on railway vehicles. Easily installed on existing tracks, it’s designed for 24/7, all-season operation, and last year achieved certification for automated wheel profiling from Deutsche Bahn (DB).
A Landmark Order
This order marks a significant moment for automated wheel profile measurement in Europe. A deployment of this scale — across a national network, standardised across varied sites and operating conditions — is among the most ambitious of its kind on the continent.
For SBB, a railway internationally recognised for its reliability and punctuality, the decision to move to automated measurement reflects the organisation’s broader push toward condition-based maintenance and away from time-consuming manual inspection.
This order is the latest in an ongoing partnership between Hexagon and SBB, showcasing the operator’s confidence in CALIPRI technology. Cooperation between the two goes back to 2014, when SBB purchased its first CALIPRI C40. Since then, the operator’s use of handheld measuring devices has continuously expanded, and today the operator uses approximately 60 CALIPRI C42 devices across its network.
This existing fleet gives some indication of the breadth of measurement tasks the operator manages across its network. The C42 is a multifunctional device combining wheel profile, brake disc, wheel diameter and wheel clearance measurement in a single unit, and has been central to SBB’s maintenance workflows since the partnership began.
It’s that day-to-day familiarity with CALIPRI technology, and the quality of data it consistently delivers, that made the step up to automated measurement a natural progression rather than a leap into the unknown.
The Case for CALIPRI X
When it came to selecting an automated system, two factors were decisive to SBB’s decision: measurement accuracy and the comparability of CALIPRI X results with those from the existing C42 handhelds. For an operator running both systems across a national network, consistency between manual and automated measurement data is not simply nice-to-have; it’s essential for meaningful trend analysis and maintenance planning.
System availability was the third key criterion, reflecting SBB’s requirement for a solution that could be relied upon in daily operational use with minimal downtime. For an operator running systems continuously, having a responsive partner on hand matters as much to uptime as the technology itself and Hexagon is known for the quality of its support. That reputation played into SBB’s decision to choose CALIPRI technology.
Underpinning all three was a broader demand: a standardised solution capable of being implemented consistently across every site, while still meeting the specific operational requirements of each individual location. That was no small ask across a network as geographically and climatically varied as Switzerland’s.
A Blueprint for Europe
Implementation is scheduled to begin in March 2027, when the first CALIPRI X system will be installed in Zurich. Further systems will roll out step by step across the remaining sites until national coverage is complete.
The scale and profile of this deployment give it significance beyond Switzerland. A standardised, multi-site rollout of automated wheelset measurement across an entire national network is a first for Europe, and the results are likely to be watched closely by other operators considering a similar shift toward condition-based maintenance.
Alongside SBB, European CALIPRI customers include Deutsche Bahn (DB), ÖBB, SNCF and Trenitalia. Further afield, and supported by a worldwide network of over 50 distribution partners, customers include Indian Railways, which also recently purchased four CALIPRI X wheel profile measurement systems.
To find out more about the CALIPRI range, please contact Hexagon’s specialists.
This article was originally published by Hexagon.
