At the kind invitation of the European Railway Agency (ERA), Mr Pio Guido – Head of the ERTMS Unit – welcomed the UIC ERTMS Platform steering members to Lille, France.
Under the chairmanship of Mr Michele Elia – RFI / FS CEO – and with the presence of about 20 IMs, RUs, ERA and representative bodies CER, EIM and ERTMS Users Group, the 11th Platform Steering meeting took place in Lille on 5 February. The Executive Director of ERA, Mr Marcel Verslype, attended part of the meeting.
The Platform main objective is strongly focused on the development of managerial and technical strategies to foster a viable migration for ERTMS, compliant with the whole railway sector interests. The interchange of information between Members currently running ERTMS lines in commercial operation together with sharing feedback from the ERA working groups and UIC projects has become a vital activity to foster ERTMS implementations.
The day-to-day Italian experience on ERTMS / ETCS lev.2 applications were brought to members’ attention. The SRS 2.3.0d is the single technical baseline which unifies all previous versions in use on Milan-Bologna, put in commercial operation in Dec. 2008, and it will be used on Bologna-Florence next year.
After about 5 million train km of commercial operation in Italy on ETCS Lev.2, a few problems have been detected and put on the table of steering members for discussion and comparison with similar experiences of implementing railways. Actions have been planned in order to collect further feedbacks from the field, structure them and find possible common solutions. The ultimate aim is to propose fine tuning of future specs’ versions. Experiences on cross border traffic are of major interest for Platform members. Currently, Cisalpino 2 ETR 610 trains (from SBB) make test runs in Italy on Turin-Novara section (ETCS lev.2) to complete fine tuning of rolling stock parameters in order to be allowed to run on the two countries.
The Benchmark Study on ERTMS implementation costs has entered the global data collection phase in 2009. New case studies recently developed were with ADIF / RENFE – Madrid, 2-3 Feb. 2009 and SBB – Infrastructure - Mattstetten-Rothrist line (ETCS lev.2) – Paris, 11 Feb. 2009.
Energy in order to offer this contribution and start a possible future co-operation.
Planning and reporting pro- cesses are well established at Platform level. The Platform Annual Report 2008 and the Action Plan 2009 were made available to members at the meeting.
The former document reports the full description of activities developed and results achieved in 2008. The CD Rom 2009 enclosed with the report contains a complete collection of official documents and deliverables produced during 2008. The CD Rom 2009 together with the CD Rom 2008 document the whole Platform activity from the very beginning to the end of 2008.
For the first time, at the next Platform Plenary #7, Members will vote the new ERTMS programme 2010-2012. The positive vote implies the Members firm commitment to fund the project for the entire lifespan and to contribute to its development.
The Platform Focus#3 has been issued as well. It reports news on the major projects: ERTMS Implementation Benchmark, GSM-R, ETCS, ERTMS Regional and INESS.
Platform Members will meet in Málaga on 30 March 2009, at their Plenary #7 session, one day before the opening of the UIC ERTMS World Conference.