The invention relates to a method for detecting operating safety-threatening damage in the railway traffic of rail vehicles which are assembled in the form of trains, especially high speed trains, with multi-axle driving gears mounted together in bogies. Damage that appears in the driving gears during travel and existing damaged areas in the track being travelled on are detected immediately by means of a bogie noise pattern which is formed from the output signals of sound pick-up devices allocated to each bogie. Each bogie noise pattern is analysed for temporal changes. The temporal changes in at least one series of bogie noise patterns belonging to consecutive bogies are compared with each other and evaluated.