Improving Europe’s rail infrastructure and making it more attractive from a commercial perspective opens up the possibility of attracting passengers – and freight – back onto the railways. This means that they can be moved with considerably greater efficiency and less impact on the environment. As railway transport specialists believe, the ERTMS is the only step towards building a more efficient international traffic, either cross-border between European countries or between the states of the Eurasian Platform.
Interoperability-related problems have always been, and sometimes they are still, a hindrance in the path of European rail operations. Less developed signalling systems have been the main hindrance. The existence of more than 20 signalling systems in Europe is viewed as a critical factor. Indeed, each train used by a national rail company has to be equipped with at least one system, but sometimes more, just to be able to run safely within that one country.
Each year people die in accidents at level crossings involving road vehicles colliding with trains. 95% of these fatalities are attributed to faults by the road vehicle driver who doesn’t pay attention to signalling. Despite this fact, society labels most fatal accidents at level crossings as a rail problem.
Despite the best safety precautions, level crossings remain a weak point. Operations are fully automatic. In the event of a malfunction, the fail-safe principle applies. The safety system takes over and prevents a level crossing from opening by mistake. Nevertheless, most incidents still occur at level crossings. Car driver carelessness and recklessness are usually to be blamed. That is why, it is recommended to replace level crossings with tunnels or bridges where possible.
What can we do to re-establish the balance?
In many countries, level crossings on less important roads and railway lines are often “open” or “uncontrolled”, sometimes with warning lights or bells to warn of approaching trains. Another critical point is the lack of projects in which rail and road operators are jointly involved.
To reduce the impacts due to accident operational consequences at level crossing and to increase safety and human awareness is important to introduce new technologies in the level crossings operational management, but high safety requirements together with high railway standards are presently hindering technological upgrade of level crossings.
In order to calculate the risks of failure and hence the change in failure risk when new technology is introduced, it is necessary to carry out a comprehensive physical decomposition of the system in question.
Moreover is not possible to quantify the relationship between the cost of new technologies and the risk reduction that their introduction involves. This is mainly due to unavailability of a statistical base and the missing of data standardisation as well as inputs for the required evaluations.
Significant part of the technology-oriented rail side projects is dedicated to the investigation of low cost solutions applicable especially to level crossings with low traffic conditions (road and rail). The aim of these projects is to reduce the contemporary relatively high number of accidents occurring on passive level crossings equipped only with St. Andrew‘s cross. Such technological developments are in their testing and evaluation phase in Austria (ISIS), Switzerland (Micro) and France (SAL0).
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