Characterization of railway line impedance based only on short‐circuit measurements

This paper presents a new methodology to obtain the line impedance of current railway tracks by using only short‐circuit measurements. Open‐circuit measurements required by conventional methodologies are discarded, since they cannot be carried out for railway tracks in service (electrically continuous and indefinite length). The mathematical basis of the proposed methodology is based on the transmission line theory but focused on the changes in track length. The proposal has been successfully applied to characterize the impedance of the high‐speed railway line at the Spanish AVE Madrid–Valencia (Cuenca) and in the AVE Atocha–Chamartin tunnel (Madrid). Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.