The UIC expert group on Telecommunications for Railways (PETER) is formed by 25 members and represents about 20 Railway Companies, the EURATEL Organisation and the GSM-R project.
The group meets three times per year and the plenary sessions are always preceded by a short Steering Group meeting the afternoon before.
They met in Paris on 31st Oct. at their 17th Plenary meeting.
The group has been working, since beginning of 2006, at an integrated telecom platform. The objective is to design and realise a unique railway telecom infrastructure where fixed and mobile telecom networks are fully integrated and “signalling railway applications” can run with the requested QoS.
One of the major activities is the “ERNST data base”. It was set in 2000 - the acronym stands for: “European Railway Numbering Scheme for Telecommunications” - it currently contains the numbering schemes of the railway telecommunications networks, fixed and mobile, namely GSM-R. The data base, hosted at the UIC Web server in Paris, contains values from 27 Infrastructure Managers, Railway Operators and Railway Organisations in 24 countries. With the new features being implemented, a restricted area contains a complete inventory of national circuits, which form part of international telecommunication lines, and routing tables of telephone switches. These pieces of information help telecommunication staff to operate and maintain the network. The data base has become a powerful tool to manage the telecom network.

Visit the ERNST database at : www.irtn.net or ernst.uic.asso.fr

For more information please contact Paolo De Cicco, Chairman of the PETER group and UIC ERTMS Platform co-ordinator: decicco at uic.asso.fr and Françoise El Alaoui: elalaoui at uic.asso.fr.