The CAT is an appropriate instrument for measurement of rails to assess roughness in accordance with the recommendations of the provisional International Standard ISO 3095. Indeed it far exceeds the requirements of this Standard insofar as hundreds of feet of rail can be measured continuously, accurately and quickly through a test site, rather than simply isolated lengths. Such a continuous measurement permits kurtosis analysis to be used to determine whether individual lengths of track are typical of a full test site.

The CAT stores raw profile data from which measurement statistics are derived. The CAT stores rail profile data at intervals of 1mm or 2mm (selectable), and with a precision of 0.01 micron. For specialized presentation or data processing, all applications can export measured or derived data in a standard plain text form suitable for processing by other applications.