Railway settlement monitoring · Live demo

Drilling under a live railway — without stopping the trains

When pipes are pushed beneath an active rail line, Danish law requires continuous settlement monitoring. See exactly how it’s done — on the real Hammersholt setup — then log into a live demo and explore the data yourself.

Open the live demo Book a walkthrough

A real job on the Copenhagen S-train network

The Hammersholt track on a 3D map in Senmos, with north and south rail live value boxes showing displacement and temperature per node
The track on the map, sensors pinned where they really sit, live values per rail.

In 2024–25, district-heating pipes were installed under S-train line A at Hammersholt near Hillerød. Trains had to keep running while the ground beneath them was disturbed — so every millimetre of track settlement was watched in real time.

Banedanmark — rail authority · LIFA — surveying & lead · Worldsensing — wireless tiltmeters · KI / Senmos — monitoring platform

“We greatly appreciate our partnership and the excellent collaboration with KI. Using Senmos is simple, and our clients have expressed great satisfaction with the visualizations on the platform.”

Jakob LarsenLand surveyor and Partner at LIFA

Section illustration showing the settlement trough that forms as a pipe is pushed under the track, with the tiltmeter chain tracing its shape

How the track is instrumented

54 Worldsensing tiltmeters sit on aluminium beams fixed between every third sleeper, forming a continuous shape array along each rail. As pipes are pushed under the track, a settlement trough forms — and the array draws its exact shape. The beams span between sleepers, so each inclinometer measures the tilt of a short length of track. Chain them together and the array reads the shape of the settlement, not just its depth at one point.

Section — Pipes pushed under the track create a settlement trough; the tiltmeter shape array along each rail captures its exact shape.

Sensor-to-screen, every 30 seconds

LIFA aluminium beams

Purpose-built ~1.8 m beams hold one tiltmeter each and clamp across the track — turning point sensors into a continuous array.

Worldsensing tiltmeters

54 wireless tiltmeters measuring track tilt and internal temperature.

Worldsensing MQTT → Senmos

Live readings stream straight into Senmos over Worldsensing’s cloud MQTT — every 30 s, no manual import.

Automated alarms

Predefined thresholds trigger alerts the moment a genuine settlement trend appears.

The tiltmeters at Hammersholt are Worldsensing, but nothing about the method is tied to one vendor — Senmos is hardware-agnostic, and the same shape array can be built from whatever suits the job. In-place inclinometer (IPI) strings from Sisgeo or Geosense, wireless inclinometer arrays from Ackcio, Senceive or Move Solutions, tilt sensors from Level Developments, or high-rate acquisition from Dewesoft — all feed the same processing chain and the same alarms.

The hard part Senmos does for you

Raw tilt on a 1.8 m aluminium beam under a moving train is buried in temperature drift and vibration. Here’s what Senmos does to each inclinometer’s signal — and how the clean live values become a shape array.

1 Each tiltmeter measures tilt (°) the raw value we send to Senmos θ we send θ in degrees; the platform turns it into mm. 2 Anchor the ends to zero (= remove the mean – the same step). Bounded ends. 0 (track level) raw – the far end floats to ~8 mm, so the whole profile tilts into a slope pinned = 0 pinned = 0 bore under track pin both ends to 0 → the slope is removed, leaving only the real central settlement 3 Temperature compensation per sensor, from its own known temperature Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 4 raw – daily temperature swing looks like settling & recovering every day compensated → only the real, slow settlement 4 Filter vibration drop the reading taken as a train passes. train passes dropped Each inclinometer’s clean live value (°) → the platform assembles them into the shape array →
Figure — From one tiltmeter to a clean shape array: measure tilt (°), anchor the ends to zero so only the real central dip remains, compensate each sensor for its own temperature, and — in production — drop the train-pass spikes.

See it live in Senmos

The demo is a fully working Senmos project on the real Hammersholt location — with simulated data so you can explore freely. Log in and you can:

Watch the shape arrays

Both rails’ deflected profiles updating live as the trough develops.

Explore in 3D

The track on a 3D map, sensors pinned where they really sit.

Dig into one sensor

Open any tiltmeter’s full history.

See the calculations

Inspect the virtual channels — differential settlement, % of limit.

The north rail shape array in Senmos, showing the settlement trough drawn across 21 positions on three datesDeflection and temperature line plots per location along the north rail in Senmos, over one monthA correlation plot in Senmos of rail deflection against temperature, with the best-fit line and correlation coefficient

The shape array — the settlement trough drawn from 21 tiltmeters, anchored to zero at both ends

Open the live demo project Calculate your price

Demonstration data. This is a Senmos demo built on a real, public reference project (Hammersholt, Banedanmark/LIFA). The live demo project uses simulated data at 30-minute intervals to illustrate the platform; it is not live monitoring of an operational railway.