Page 120 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 5

González, Ricardo.

1. Introduction

Digitalization is one of the key factors to ensure an increasing use of railway, especially High-
Speed Railway and to achieve three important mobility objectives: efficiency, reliability and
sustainability.

The High-Speed Railway has evolved from the initial projects. The evolution of the technology
during the last years has produced several techniques and applications that can be used by
High-Speed Railway. Although, due to the High-Speed Railway safety requirements, every
technological step in railway technology has been taken with great care. It is time to evaluate
the current state of the railway and define the functionality required for the medium term.
The paper describes these applications and the development of railway signalling technologies,
linked with the digital era. One of them is ETCS Level 3, where Siemens have been working
in the last years, and where wireless communication will make part of track infrastructure
unnecessary. This will improve the availability and maintenance of infrastructures, facilitating
greater occupation of the railways and total safety.

2. State of the High-Speed Railway today

This chapter describe the success factors of the High-Speed Railway, the current requirementsof
the different stakeholders and the Siemens signalling products related with High-Speed Railway.
2.1 Success factors

Today High-Speed Railway is worldwide perceived as a transportation system which is:

Figure 1: Success factors
Safety is one of the main aspects of a High-Speed Railway. The number of fatalities experienced
on High-Speed Railways is much lower than in other transport systems. Signalling systems used
for the control of High-Speed Railways meet the highest safety standards, ensuring that the
likelihood of a wrong side failure is very low.
Comfortability is provided by modern rolling stock and its associated services on board. Another
important element that contributes to comfortability is the reduced time that the passenger
needs to be at the station before the departure of the train. This is really an advantage when
compared with other transport systems as aviation. Another positive factor is that main train

118 360.revista de alta velocidad