The paper discusses an application for rail track thermal image fault detection. In order to get better results from the Canny edge detection algorithm, the image needs to be processed in advance. The histogram equalization method is proposed to enhance the contrast of the image. Since a thermal image contains multiple parallel rail tracks, an algorithm has been developed to locate and separate the tracks that we are interested in. This is accomplished by applying the least squares linear fitting technique to represent the surface of a track. The performance of the application is evaluated by using a number of images provided by a specialised company and the results are essentially favourable.