Network Rail awarded Siemens Mobility a EUR 36 million to upgrade the GSM-R cab radios of the entire Great Britain rolling stock fleet. The upgrade will begin in October with each of the 9,052 driving cabs being upgraded over the next 30 months and will be completed in March 2022.
In addition, Siemens Mobility will deliver 1,948 spare communication radios, for a total of 11,000. Each train will be equipped with Siemens Mobility’s V4.0 model cab radio, which will provide train operators with improved interference resistant, communication quality and performance.
Siemens Mobility has completed a series of trials with Network Rail to demonstrate and prove the GB version 4.0 software and Nexus hardware. Covering more than 100 trains, the trials were undertaken over a 2-month period and successfully concluded in January 2019. They achieved an average mean time between failure in excess of 50,000 hours.
At the same time, Network Rail has been working with Siemens Mobility to evaluate the use of Nexus RCM, an application that effectively creates a digital representation of the condition of the track assets, gathering data on the condition of the rail, in real-time, to enable targeted preventative maintenance to take place.
“Our program to upgrade over 11, 000 GSM-R cab mobiles to V4.0 will deliver significant benefits to passengers and the railway. It will resolve the rail safety risk and performance impact attributed to interference on the railway from public mobile network operators and enable them to improve their coverage for passengers at locations where we have asked them to turn down their coverage or power,” Simon Atterwell, Director, Network Rail Telecom, said.
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