Condition monitoring and fault detection systems are becoming increasingly important in rail vehicles maintenance and operation, ensuring safety and reliability improvement. Light rail systems are not the main target for this trend, because of low operational speed and lower safety factors. Nevertheless public transport operators begin to pay a closer attention to the technical state monitoring of vehicle and track, in order to reduce maintenance cost and increase safety and ride comfort for passengers, which is an important challenge for public transport competitiveness in XXI century. The paper describes the main concept of the innovative on-board condition monitoring system for light rail vehicle and track. Functional requirements, assumptions and procedures are described, as well as the on-board data acquisition unit with necessary transducers, which number, function and technical parameters were optimized during the research phase of the project. The prototype of the presented system is now being tested in normal operating conditions.

Elaboration of a new method of teaching spatial orientation to blind and visually handicapped persons base on urban environment sounds was shown. Task 1 is a questionnaire inquiry on the problems of the blind moving in a big city. In Task 2 a preliminary selection and classication of the acoustic signals and vibrations that can be useful for spatial orientation was made. In Task 3 an analysis of acoustic signals for sound signalisation at pedestrian crossings was made. Some solutions for acoustic signalization were proposed. In Task 4 sounds and vibrations necessary for a library of acoustic events and situations characteristic of a city were recorded. In Task 5 the library was created and arranged to be ready to be used by teachers in the spatial orientation training. The most important outcome of the study was to develop a method of spatial orientation teaching with employment of sounds and verication of the method (Task 6). After verication it is concluded that the method is useful for spatial education of the blind at dierent levels of their education.

In this article authors show the possibillities of using the parameters of vibration signals to estimate valve clearance in internal combustion engines. The main methodological assumptions of signal analysis and their results have been presented herein. The concept of research so as to solve the valve clearance diagnostic problem, based on the vibration signal, has been shown as well.

Technical requirements for the tram certification process are different between particular EU countries. Uniformity for this procedure is not required in view of the infrastructure of closed cities, hence the Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSI) are not valid. The certification process includes a lot of evaluation aspects for tram interaction in highly urbanized cities. One of them is noise, the level of which depends on the quality of interaction between vehicles and the infrastructure. In homologation tests, stationary, pass-by and signaling noise measurements are included. However, not all of these requirements can always be implemented in cities due to the course of an operated tram network. One of the requirements is the distance from the track axis to the measurement position described as 7.5 m. This requirement is difficult to reflect for a real tram infrastructure, especially in city centers and vintage city areas. For this reason, we can only partially fulfil all standard requirements. This leads to problems with the interpretation of results and impedes final verification of vehicle condition in terms of the fulfilment of operator's requirements contained in tender specifications and technical standards. Presented problems entail the need to evaluate existing technical requirements in terms of their feasibility in cities. The paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the certification requirements for noise level measurements with regard to the Polish city selected. The authors analyzed a tram infrastructure and its environment in terms of the ability to fulfil existing standards conditions for homologation tests.

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