Vegetation growing on railway trackbeds and embankments can present several potential problems. Consequently, such vegetation is controlled through various maintenance procedures. In order to investigate the extent of maintenance needed, one of the first steps in any maintenance procedure is to monitor or inspect the railway section in question. Monitoring is often carried out manually by sending out inspectors or by watching recorded video clips of the section in question. To facilitate maintenance planning, the ability to assess the extent of vegetation becomes important. This paper investigates the reliability of human assessments of vegetation on railway trackbeds. In this study, five maintenance engineers made independent visual estimates of vegetation cover and counted the number of plant clusters from images. The test results showed an inconsistency between the raters when it came to visually estimating plant cover and counting plant clusters. The results showed that caution should be exercised when interpreting individual raters' assessments of vegetation.
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