UK: The winners of £3·5m of government funding under the ‘First of a Kind: Demonstrating Tomorrow’s Trains Today’ innovation programme were announced by Transport Minister Jo Johnson on February 12. T The FOAK competition is part of the Department for Transport’s wider Accelerating Innovation in Rail scheme. The first ‘challenge’ covers rolling stock, and saw
UK: The Rail Safety & Standards Board is working with Alstom with the aim of piloting a hydrogen powered train in late 2019 or early 2020, RSSB Chief Executive Mark Phillips said on February 12. Philips was responding to a speech by Transport Minister Jo Johnson, who said he ‘would like to see us take
MALAYSIAN engineering firm George Kent announced to the Kuala Lumpur stock exchange on February 12 that it has reached an agreement with Siemens, Alstom, Italian State Railways (FS) and Porr, Austria, to form a consortium to bid for the AssetsCo tender for the Singapore – Kuala Lumpur high-speed line. The companies will now work to
BRITAIN’s minister of state with the Department of Transport (DfT), Mr Jo Johnson, has called for the withdrawal of diesel-only trains by 2040 and the decarbonisation of the railway. In his first speech as rail minister, Johnson says he wants the railway to provide a vision of how it will decarbonise. “I expect the industry
ABOUT THIS WEBINAR The whole railway market is shifting towards remote monitoring of its key assets. Data analysis and connectivity aims to gradually change preventive maintenance from a systematic approach to on-condition and, eventually, to predictive maintenance. Alstom’s rail system approach is focused on system behaviour, which is what delivers service reliability. Alstom understands the
AUSTRIA: The HTW 100 E³ hybrid motor tower vehicle developed by Plasser & Theurer for overhead line inspection and maintenance has been successfully tested in the Climate Wind Chamber at Rail Tec Arsenal in Wien. Launched at the IAF track technology fair in Münster last June, the HTW 100 E³ is equipped with a battery
USA: Wabtec Corp has signed a $62m contract to design, install, test and commission Positive Train Control for the 100 km Central Florida Rail Corridor used by SunRail commuter services around Orlando. Wabtec is to provide its Interoperable Electronic Train Management System equipment for 24 locomotives and driving cars, as well as a back-office server, lineside
THE first of seven Hitachi Rail Italy Sirio LRVs for Florence light rail Line T3 arrived in the Tuscan capital on February 9. The 4.1km line will link the current terminus of Line T1 at Alamanni-Stazione with Careggi Hospital in the north of the city, with a journey time of around 20 minutes. The 32m-long
EUROPE: Switzerland-based intermodal transport operator Hupac carried 763 101 road consignments by rail in 2017, an increase of 3·5% on the previous year. This was despite the seven-week blockade of the Rhine Valley route near Rastatt, which resulted in the loss of more than 30 000 consignments. Traffic in the first six months of 2017 had been
