Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are applicable to deliver train locations in real time. This train localization function should comply with railway functional safety standards; thus, the GNSS performance needs to be evaluated in consistent with railway EN 50126 standard [Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety (RAMS)]. This paper demonstrates the performance of the GNS...

In the past, the railway industry has been faced with simple technical and technological systems which included a small number of defined inputs and outputs, comprising only simple subsystems and components. Thus, a single manager could understand them almost completely and could predict failure conditions and the consequences thereof. These days, railway technical and technological systems are...

Railway level crossings have the potential to bring motor vehicles and trains into fatal contact. In Australia there are approximately 9,400 public railway level crossings across the country, protected either passively (64%) or by active/automated systems (28%). Passive crossings provide only a stationary sign warning of the possibility of trains crossing. Their message remains constant over ti...

Due to the automation and centralisation of railway operation the demand for train monitoring systems arises to guarantee operational safety in times of liberalisation of the railway market. The motivation for wayside train monitoring has it’s origin in national considerations and regulations. Accordingly monitoring systems are designed for national use, but the market of railway undertakings i...

Some recent incidents have shown that possibly the vulnerability of IT systems in railway automation has been underestimated. Fortunately, so far, almost only denial-of-service attacks were successful, but due to several trends, such as the use of commercial IT and communication systems or privatization, the threat potential could increase in the near future. However, up to now, no harmonized I...

Reliability is one of the key factors in transportation, both for passengers and for cargo. This paper examines reliability in public railway systems. Reliability of railway services is a complex matter, since there are many causes for disruptions and at least as many causes for delays to spread around in space and time. One way to increase the reliability is to reduce the propagation of delays...

RFID technology has been widely utilized for the tracking and identification of numerous stationary and moving objects. One of the most challenging RFID applications has to do with the improvement in reliability, scheduling and efficiency of large‐scale transportation infrastructure. As an example, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in Ultra High Friency (UHF) frequen...

Applications based on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), in combination with different communication systems, have significantly helped to increase safety, efficiency and system capacity of operations in different modes of transportation. Here railway transport is no exception, although the number of applications based on GNSS has been considerably behind the number of those used in...

Transshipment yards, where gantry cranes allow for an e cient transshipment of containers between di erent freight trains, are important entities in modern railway systems and facilitate the general shift from point-to-point transport to hub-and-spoke railway systems. Modern rail-rail transshipment yards accelerate container handling, so that multiple smaller trains with equal destination can b...