Events
ERTMS projects conference: lessons learned

The theme was "Applying The Lessons Learned From Existing ERTMS Projects To Your Implementation Strategy." And accordingly, much of the day's discussions focused on leveraging the practical experience of leading ERTMS projects for successful commercial implementation.

The Chairman Dan Otteborn used the opportunity to stress that ERTMS is ready now. "Let's deploy it before it becomes obsolete," he exhorted, noting that most of the remaining minor problems are related to Rolling Stock, and listing as examples Man Machine Interface and brake control. European Community representative Mr Antonio Colaço expressed similar opinions: "ERTMS already provides the possibility of multiple suppliers, a big advance compared to existing national systems." As he put it, ETCS is only one "brick" of ERTMS, dealing only with signaling. "There is more to ERTMS than that," he said. "There is GSM-R, but also traffic management which is starting to take off with the Europtirails initiative." The EC representative spoke in length about the cost of projects, the small proportion signaling represented to rolling stock, and the commitment from the Commission to support early implementers of ETCS. "In the future, signalling will no longer be considered as separate pieces of equipment, but as a natural part of the rolling stock."

Mr. Jaime Tamari, Managing Director of the ERTMS Users Group provided the details of European Specification for Interoperability. He also mentioned where current work is on-going, such as the operational rules working group, and illustrated the progress made by some migration to ERTMS strategies for Germany, including the Paris-Frankfort corridor, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. GSM-R specialist Peter Fischer from OBB gave a very interesting return on experience from the project in Austria. It tackled all aspects but more specifically the cross border agreement needed, the cost impacts and the architecture retained to offer the required service quality, namely the issues relative to network redundancy. Among the railways presenting their migration strategy for ERTMS were DB, UK, and Romania, which is betting on ERTMS although not a EC member. Finally, it was noted that ERTMS is going beyond Europe. This first standard ever in signaling has already attracted the attention of South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey and China, all which will soon launch calls to tender.