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The usage of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) – widely known as ‘drones’ – is being increasingly investigated in a variety of surveillance scenarios. Being an emerging technology, several challenges still need to be tackled in order to make drones suitable in real applications with strict performance, dependability and privacy requirements. In particular, the monitoring of transit infrastructures represents one critical domain in which drones could be of huge help to reduce costs and possibly increase the granularity of surveillance. Furthermore, drones pave the way to the implementation of smart-sensing functionalities expanding current capabilities in railway monitoring, to support automation, safety of operations, prognostics and even forensic analyses. In this paper we provide a survey of current drone technology and their possible applications to automated railway surveillance, taking into account technical issues and environmental constraints. A current experimentation with drone intelligent video will be addressed, highlighting some preliminary results and future perspectives. © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.