Capacity4Rail

The CAPACITY4RAIL project faces the challenge of offering a high operational capacity with high reliability and resilience to hazards, taking into account future increases traffic to make the railway system more attractive and competitive

This challenge will only be achieved through a global and combined optimisation of infrastructure, operation and vehicle performances.

Paving the way for the specification of future railway technologies and systems and bringing together the major stakeholders (industry, infrastructure managers, railway undertakings, engineerings and academic sciencies), CAPACITY4RAIL will contribute to the development of guidance documents identifying further actions to be taken and the future technologies and systems to be developed.

Moreover, it will demonstrate that change in railway infrastructure and operations may be achieved within the constraints of the need to maintain railway services while the work is being performed.

The capacity issue will be addressed in CAPACITY4RAIL from several aspects.

• Improving the system’s performance.
  • Performance of very high speed systems: bridges and transition zones.
  • Speed of freight trains.
  • Carrying capacity of freight trains (longer) and wagons (larger).
  • Improved transhipment procedures and facilities (marshalling yards, terminals).
  • Improved traffic planning and operation: automated data exchange and reasoning.
• Making the system more reliable and resilient: avoiding accident and mitigate traffic disruptions.
  • Improved behaviour of bridges and transition zones at very high speed.
  • Design based on failure modes for switches and crossings.
  • Resilient to natural hazards (extreme weather conditions) in switches and crossings.
  • Development of failure detection for infrastructure and freight vehicles.
  • Intelligent vehicles
  • Resilient operations: decision support systems and incident management plans.
• Making the system more available: allocating more time to operation.
  • Reduced construction time and maintenance for infrastructure.
  • Development of monitoring for condition-based maintenance.
  • Non-intrusive infrastructure monitoring techniques with low impact on traffic.
  • Self-monitoring and intelligent components.

The CAPACITY4RAIL Project is coordinated by the UIC and there are 46 partners from the EU and third countries (Turkey), including the most relevant actors in the railway infrastructures sector such as ADIF (Spain), Network Rail (UK), SNCF (France), Deutsche Bahn (Germany) or Trafikverket (Sweden).

CEMOSA participates this Project within Subproject 1 “Infrastructure”, where it contributes to the design of a new slab track concept for high speed and mixed traffic. The design is optimised in terms of reliability (RAMS) and costs (LCC).

Furthermore, CEMOSA is the leader of a work package on integrated monitoring within Subproject 4 “Advanced monitoring”, where it develops low-cost sensors embedded in the new infrastructure elementos for structurla health monitoring.