News

BOMBARDIER has rolled out the 200th VLocity DMU from its Dandenong factory for Public Transport Victoria for operation on regional services in the Australian state of Victoria.

MONTENEGRO’s rail infrastructure manager ZICG has awarded AŽD Praha a €6.1m contract to resignal the main station in the capital Podgorica.

ITALY’s minister of transport and infrastructure Mr Graziano Delrio has approved funding of €214m for the purchase of 22 mainline trains, five regional trains and seven CAF Urbos LRVs for Calabria.

BRITAIN’s infrastructure manager Network Rail (NR) has awarded a £29m contract to Atkins to resignal 42km of lines linking Norwich, Yarmouth and Lowestoft in eastern England.

THE proposal to build a transcontinental railway linking Brazil and Peru - the Bi-oceanic Railway - has hit a stumbling block on the choice of the best route through Peru.

GERMAN open-access operator Locomore is set to resume services on the Stuttgart - Berlin route on August 24 after Czech open-access operator Leo Express agreed to take over the operations of the insolvent company.

Vossloh is optimising its rail fastening systems by developing new tension clamps and other fastening components. This is being achieved thanks to a new co-simulation of FEM and MBS models, as Dr-Ing Duo Liu and Dr-Ing Sven Kretzschmar, engineers with Vossloh Fastening Systems’ research and development department, explain.

THE Karlsruhe - Basle main line in southwest Germany, one of Europe’s key rail freight arteries, has been closed since August 12 following a major earth movement caused by groundwater entering the construction site of the new 4.27km tunnel being built under Rastatt.

EGYPTIAN prime minister Mr Sherif Ismail attended a ceremony in Cairo on August 15 to witness the signing of a $US 1.24bn contract between Egypt’s National Authority for Tunnels (NAT) and a consortium of China’s Avic International and China Railway Group for the construction of an interurban light rail line to the east of Cairo.

Railways are using optical fibre sensing networks to switch from scheduled to condition-based and predictive maintenance, explains Shun-Yee Liu, Hwa-Yaw Tam, and Kang-Kuen Lee from Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s electrical engineering department, and Kei-Chun Cheng from Volant Railway Technologies, Hong Kong.

Colas Rail has long had a desire to expand its rolling stock maintenance business, and took a major step forward in October 2016 by establishing a new French subsidiary, Ramfer. Dan Templeton visits the company’s hub in Grenay, France, to get a closer look at how it is managing its maintenance activities.

Despite pushing back the opening date of the Ui Line, the latest addition to its metro from July until September, Seoul is on course to expand its 327km network by 89km by 2025. Andy Tebay reflects on recent developments in the Korean capital, including a shift to light metro and light rail projects from traditional heavy metro lines.

China is embarking on a hugely ambitious project to build a new railway between Chengdu and Lhasa in Tibet. Xinhua’s Yu Fei outlines the project and the environmental challenges facing its contractors and engineers.

China is continuing to expand its high-speed rail network as fast as it can to meet people’s growing transport needs and support the country’s industrial development and economic restructuring, as Han Qiao and Fan Xi with China Features explain.

INDIA’s Commissioner of Metro Railway Safety (CMRS) Mr Satish Kumar Pandey gave the go-ahead for commercial operation of the first metro line in Lucknow on August 14 following a successful safety inspection on the initial 8.4km section of the north-south line between Transport Nagar and Charbagh.

BOMBARDIER has secured two contracts to supply a total of 72 Innovia Monorail 300 trains for two new monorail lines in Bangkok.

THE government of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has reaffirmed its intention to replace its entire regional rolling stock fleet and has also announced a new depot will be constructed in the regional centre of Dubbo to maintain the new trains.

SWEDISH infrastructure manager Trafikverket has awarded Sweco a contract to provide planning and design services for the modernisation of the country’s busiest station Stockholm Central.

In a bid to win support in European Union (EU) member states for the technical pillar of the Fourth Railway Package, the European Agency for Railways conducted a road-show throughout the European Union culminating in a conference in Brussels in June. The agency’s executive director Josef Doppelbauer spoke to David Briginshaw about the rationale for the road-show.

TRENITALIA confirmed on August 11 that it has acquired 17 of the 19 AnsaldoBreda V250 trains ordered by Netherlands Railways (NS) and Belgian National Railways (SNCB), which were rendered surplus by the collapse of the Amsterdam - Brussels Fyra high-speed service in 2013.