With RailTech Europe 2021 less than a month away, the nominees for this year’s Innovation Awards are selected. In this article you can read about the nominated companies and how their innovation is relevant to the railway sector. Six Innovation Awards will be given out at the digital event RailTech Europe 2021.
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The biggest drawback of the North Sea-Baltic rail corridor is currently the lack of the European traffic control system ERTMS. Bottlenecks in the network that hinder the operation of 740-meter freight trains should also be tackled as soon as possible, says Catherine Trautmann, who is European coordinator of the North Sea-Baltic rail corridor since 2014.
“We can’t afford to send out a maintenance team when we don’t know what’s going on, we have to anticipate failures”, says Diego Galar, professor of condition monitoring at the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. He will be speaking at RailTech Europe 2021 and in this interview, he talks about the increasing importance of predictive maintenance for high railway capacity and that there is often too much data, but little information.
“Railway operators should work together more. If we get people out of the car and into the train, everyone will benefit”, says Delphine Grandsart, researcher at the European Passenger Federation
(EPF). In this interview, she talks about the needs of passengers, through-ticketing, and the
importance of a user-centered approach for achieving a shift to rail.
The Russian Railways (RZD) will start using first autonomous passenger trains (GoA3) in the regular timetable in September this year. Pavel Popov, responsible for this project at the state-owned company, will tell how he will achieve this ambitious goal during RailTech Europe.
The European Commission has granted SNCF Réseau 31 million euros to finance the installation of ETCS equipment on 252 passenger vehicles and freight locomotives. Additionally, the Caisse des Dépôts, a French government-backed agency, supports the railway signalling project for an equal contribution, SNCF announced last week.
The fact that the roll-out of the European train control system ERTMS is behind schedule is no disaster according to Simon Fletcher, director Europe at the international rail organisation UIC. He said this in a video interview as a preview to RailTech Europe. Fletcher says that such projects are usually rolled out a little too enthusiastically, and in a way the current state of affairs can even be called a small success.
Austrian operator ÖBB has given one of their locomotives a special European Year of Rail design. The locomotive was presented at a ceremony at Vienna central station last week, and will be on the tracks in Austria and neighbouring countries as a sign of European sustainable mobility by rail. “The EU needs more railways so that we can achieve the climate goals, but the railways also need more Europe in order to become faster, more digital and more efficient in the future”, said ÖBB CEO Andreas Matthä.
Lithuanian company Viezo is working on sensors for the weight monitoring of freight wagons. Loading wagons too heavy on one side can lead to derailments, which has happened in the past. Like all of Viezo’s sensors, the sensors will be powered by vibration energy harvesting, a technology with very low maintenance needs.
When it comes to restoring disruptions on the track, the manual planning for taking track out of service still causes hours of delay. Dutch infrastructure manager ProRail recently started using an application developed in collaboration with software company CGI. This reduces the process of requesting a Workplace Security Instruction (WBI) to a few seconds or minutes. Developing the DDIO (Data Driven Infra Withdrawals) application took two years of work.