Approximately 25 percent of the budget for the maintenance and renewal of railway tracks -in Switzerland more than a billion Swiss Franks- is used for the switches (a.k.a. points or turnouts) and crossings (S&C). While in the mean time the budget expenditure for the maintenance and renewal of plain track is optimized with e.g. the help of decision support systems, for S&C this optimisation stays rather rudimentary. One of the identified causes thereof is the lack of insight in the degradation and deterioration process of S&C. This study therefore combined several databases of the Swiss...