About

Presentation of the project

CAPACITY4RAIL aims at paving the way for the future railway system, delivering coherent, demonstrated, innovative and sustainable solutions for:

  • Track design: transversal approach for infrastructure solutions for conventional mixed traffic and very high speed, integrated monitoring and power supply, reduced maintenance, new concept for highly reliable switches and crossings.
  • Freight: longer trains, lower tare loads, automatic coupling, enhanced braking, modern, automated, intelligent, fully integrated system for efficient, reliable and profitable freight operations
  • Operation and capacity: traffic capacity computation for freight and passenger, models and simulators for planners: capacity generation, traffic flow, resilience to perturbations, ability to recover from disturbance, computerised real time information to customers and operators at any time
  • Advanced monitoring: Integration of Advanced Monitoring Technologies in the design and building process, for a easier-to-monitor (self monitoring) infrastructure with low cost and low impact inspection

The full sustainability of the developed solutions and innovations will be assessed and scenarios for a smooth migration of the system from its current to its future state will be evaluated.

{{{What kind of impact on the railway system?}}} Paving the way for the specification of future railway technologies and systems, and bringing together the major stakeholders of industry, infrastructure managers, railway undertakers, engineering and academic sciences, CAPACITY4RAIL is also an invaluable preparation for the future European Joint Technology Initiative. With a comprehensive system vision, it will contribute to the development of guidance documents identifying further actions to be undertaken and the future technologies and systems to be developed. It will demonstrate that step 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. [->article28]