In winter, malfunctions of points on high speed routes can occur due to driving snow and ice. Existing heating systems, used to increase the availability of points positioning systems contained in hollow sleepers, cannot guarantee their operation under harsh environmental conditions. An optimized heating system is drafted using computational and experimental methods. The impacts of various designs of heating systems on the temperature profile at
a positioning system are assessed using the thermal network method. A thermal network of the hollow sleeper and the positioning system equipped with an existing heating system is compiled and verified with experiments. The experimental verification is required to minimize
the uncertainty of computed temperature profiles resulting from the uncertainty of flow and material parameters in the thermal network model. The efficiency of differently designed heating systems is calculated from computed temperature profiles of the points positioning system. A design with allocated heating elements is investigated experimentally in order to verify the computational results of that design. The temperature rise achieved with the optimized heating system is significantly higher than the one achieved with the original system, while the admissible temperatures are not exceeded.

heating system, points, hollow sleeper, thermal network method, heat transfer, temperature rise