In recent years there has been an increase in railway usage which led to reduced time for rail maintenance. Railway switches and crossings (S&C) are an important asset and they typically account for 30% of the total budget spent on maintenance. The first part of this work researches the feasibility of automatically inspecting S&Cs in accordance with Network Rail inspection requirements and the likely necessary advancements. Current S&C inspection requirements, as well as current and developing inspection solutions, were analysed and categorised. This revealed the required technological advances and likely changes that the railway will have to adopt. The second part of the work researches the weakness of conventional S&C profile inspection practices used in industry. The work identified the main reasons that can lead to poor traditional inspection of the S&C profile, developed a novel, automatic method to carry out the profile measurements which eliminated human error and identified possible improvements in the area of S&C profile inspection. During this research, an inspection trolley was prototyped, field trials were carried out, and good results were obtained.