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.
