The Signalling Company (TSC), a Škoda Group affiliate, announces the certification and release of the first of its new national Class B Automatic Train Protection solutions, TBL1+, for vehicles operating on the Belgian National Rail network.
The solution, designed and developed in close collaboration with Lineas, is built on TSC’s Universal Digital Rail Platform, iEVC-RailOS. The TSC team is also entering the certification phase for its ETCS solution scheduled for availability in 2025.
“It is an important validation milestone for ourselves and our lead customer and close collaborator, Lineas. It marks the beginning of the series retrofit cycle for the Lineas HLD77 fleet that will see these locomotives installed, commissioned and returned to work with TBL1+. It will be done after ERA/DVIS authorisation. As the platform already incorporates BTM and Odometry functions, the fleet will be ready for a software-only upgrade to ETCS in 2025-2026. The certification of our ETCS solution should be ready during next year,” says Alexander Betis, Managing Director of The Signalling Company.
An industry first, iEVC-RailOS meets the all-important Safety Integrity Level 4 (SIL4) standard for critical rail applications using standard-off-the shelf computing hardware (iEVC) running RailOS, TSC’s hyper efficient and secure real-time operating system.
“The release of TBL1+ marks the first step of the iEVC-RailOS vision shared and seeded by Lineas’ early investment in TSC. Now we can proceed with our retrofit program in the knowledge that we have a futureproof digital rail platform on board the HLD77 fleet; one that can be upgraded to support the ETCS Baseline 3 to 4 evolution and other applications during the fleet’s operational lifetime,” notes Kurt Coffyn, COO at Lineas.
“The vision is about breaking away from sole-supplier vehicle upgrades that drive the need for more hardware and software that is prohibitively expensive, consumes precious space, increases immobilization time of the locomotive, and increases maintenance cost. Instead, we now have a digital rail platform which consumes a tiny amount of space and is therefore easier to integrate and gives us access to ETCS and as many other applications that TSC or their RailOS certified development partners can provide,” adds Bruno Vanlede, Head of Fleet Management, at Lineas.
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