Welding industry is one of the leaders in the field of investments in the development of technologies and innovations aimed at ensuring functional cost-effectiveness, improving safety and speed of movement in the digital age. Ensuring the reliability and safety of the railway tracks requires the development of new scientific approaches to the use of welding technologies in the construction and operation of a high-speed railway. The main criterion for evaluating efficiency of the new approaches is the quality of the resulting welded joints and the productivity of the welding processes used. Rail connections should be made in such a way from a technical point of view that there are no restrictions during operation, the service life of the rails is not reduced, the percentage of defects does not increase, and the noise level is within the normal limits. The purpose of the study is to substantiate the cost-effectiveness and safety of the introduction of new contact welding technologies in Russia. Technical and economic analysis of welding methods is given, including using the rail welding machines — a new generation of equipment for the contact butt welding of high-strength rails during the construction and reconstruction of a high-speed railway. The Up-to-date technologies are based on the process of contact welding by pulsating reflow, on the one hand ensuring high productivity of the process, and on the other — reducing the influence of the human factor on it. This is achieved through a set of options for controlling the welding process, with online monitoring of the operational characteristics, with the software for storage and the possibility of using robotic welding in the future in the field of digital doubles and processing archived data based on the artificial intelligence as part of the implementation of Smart City projects. Feasibility study is also presented concerning the efficiency of the introduction of contact welding technology by the pulsed reflow on high-speed railway projects of Russia based on reducing the rail joint failures and improving the characteristics of the welding process and safe operation.
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