The development of a monitored district heating piping system has allowed the study of axial displacement variations in a buried pipeline. This piping system includes four instrumented sections of piping within an in use district heating network. There are also different conditions under testing such as thickness of expansion cushions, temperature ranges and bedding soil types. The pipe axial displacements were on-line monitored by means of extensometers in six positions along each of the four sections of the pipeline. Measured maximum pipe axial displacements were 24 and 25 mm in the corners of the 41 m long monitored pipelines, while estimated values were 23 mm using current recommendation procedures and 27 mm using calibrated commercial computer programs. One temperature unloading-reloading caused displacements to not return to the same values as before, but around 3 mm smaller. Therefore, several unloading-reloading temperature cycles may affect the pipe deformation behaviour in the short and long term. © 2021 Published with permission by the ICE under the CC-BY 4.0 license