There is a ‘natural’ tendency to see railway technology as backward, inbred and both resistant and slow to adopt innovations from other industries. In fact, beyond technology, rail however must make a qualitative leap by eliminating the tendency to stifle progress with a mountain of procedure, sometimes jeopardising the progress expected from an innovation.
It is a fact: the electric car has existed for 130 years… through the metro, the tramway and then the electric train. The use of green energy has long since ceased to be a challenge for the railways. Today, trains run at 320 km/h on a regular basis thanks to a overhead suspended more than 5 m above the tracks. Similarly, 3,000-tonne trains are regularly run in Europe with a single electric locomotive, not emitting the thousands of tonnes of CO2 of our American, Brazilian or Australian friends.
But the most important issue is not whether the train is greener than its aviation or road competitors. The real issue is the acceleration of technological progress by competitors, boosted by billions in research and development that rail does not have.
It is clear that the railways are operating in a fragmented way and do not always have the resources that aviation and the car have. The fact that it is a form of transport that partly uses green energy (electricity) and that it is guided transport (heavy loads, high speed), means that rail transport must be given a major priority. There are reasons for hope.
A first progress is that the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) is now Europe’s single certification body for vehicle authorisation, safety certification, and ERTMS trackside approval, replacing the EU’s previous national certification agencies. The change is intended to simplify processes and reduce administrative costs for the rail industry by providing a ‘one-stop-shop’ for rail manufacturers and international operators, enabling them to seek approval in every member state simultaneously, rather than on a country by country basis.
This is therefore a progress made possible by the elimination of procedures, which we can find in two other areas.
The first is the installation on board a locomotive of the safety systems necessary to operate in a given group of countries. So far this installation is still very cumbersome and unnecessarily keeps a locomotive in the workshop for days, if not weeks.
To go faster, the Belgian start-up The Signalling Company is trying to develop an on-board download (overnight) of a complete security system for a country. This would allow the rented locomotive to be ready for use the next day for a new mission. This download would be provided in the form of an ‘app’ as simple as those on your smartphone. Results are expected in 2022.
The second example is ETCS, which has been discussed for 20 years. It is expensive to implement, so these new technologies are not used on the lines that need them most: small lines with low traffic.
The idea of eliminating a maximum of cables and assets to be maintained has produced the concept of fixed virtual blocks (about 5km) combined with the well-tested technology of axle counters in small stations where tracks cross. This ETCS level 3 « regional » is being tested in Italy with a view to writing the technical specifications valid for everyone in Europe. Here too the results are expected soon. The aim is to speed up the implementation of the system and to eliminate the traditional red tape.