There are three basic tasks undated for the infrastructure of railway transport: increasing the safety, providing the reliability of transportation process, and reducing the technical equipment service charge. The point and point machine are one of the most important components of railway transport infrastructure. Predicting the failures of this item remains an open question. The article presents a research carried out on the rail 1520 with the most common SP type of machine and a DC motor. At the first stage, component failure analysis based on the expert approach, was performed and the main, most critical refusals are identified, taking into account three service strategies. At the second stage, economically grounded approaches to the diagnosis and prediction of certain failures are analyzed. To substantiate the conclusions of the second stage, the results of the mathematical modeling of the critical points' failure are used.