The rapid liberalisation of Europe's rail market poses a significant challenge to train planners as the growing number of cross-border and open-access trains is gradually reshaping hitherto long-standing service patterns across the continent.

Switzerland has long been at the forefront of integrated transport planning, making the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology an appropriate venue for IT08.rail.

The Netherlands and more recently the French region of Rhône-Alpes have followed SBB's example of introducing regular-interval services across all or part their network, and tools such as SMA und Partner's Viriato timetabling software and the OpenTrack simulator package, developed at the Institute's Transport Planning and Systems faculty by Daniel Hürlimann, have assisted in the difficult task of recasting train paths across a large and complex network.

The conference reflected how the timetablers' challenge is evolving with the market. Planners must achieve the twin goals of sustained punctuality and free and fair access to the network.

'The timetable must come before competition', emphasised Werner Stohler, Chief Executive of SMA. 'The interfaces of the network must be set in concrete. Only then can the competitive element be introduced', he added.

He pointed to a graphical reproduction of the latest Swiss national timetable to show how integration could be made to work. Switzerland's inter-connected ?lattice of services is built to permit easy ?interchanges from the start of a journey in a major city to end on an Alpine branch line, for example. 'The graphical timetable is a three-dimensional object, and we refer to its creators as architects', Stohler explained. 'The third dimension is time.'

IT08.rail delegates visited Visp on January 26 to see just such an interchange in action. The opening of the Lötschberg base tunnel has transformed this junction between SBB's inter-city services and the Matterhorn-Gotthard Bahn into an important regional hub. Stohler pointed out that the planned timetable had enabled a raft of connections to be created to serve main line trains towards Lausanne, Bern and Milano.

'The timetable for Visp was delivered partly by planners and partly by destiny', he said with a wry smile, referring to the geology of the Lötschberg range that allowed a tunnel to be bored to give a Bern - Visp journey time of just under an hour, which in turn permitted the straightforward implementation of an integrated timetable.

Citing SMA's development of Viriato over the past decade, and a close working relationship with the developers of OpenTrack, Stohler was adamant that 'we are actually integrating'. He suggested that, with the liberalisation of international passenger services (RG 2.08 p89) and new entrants to the freight sector emerging all the time, infrastructure managers and/or regulatory authorities must 'present the market with a timetable concept in concrete' to avoid protracted disputes about capacity and access rights. Viriato (below) is one of a number of software products that can assist both operators and infrastructure authorities in setting out such a timetable, and Thalys is using the tool to assess its own future pathing needs (p194).

Cautious outlook on open access

Speaking to delegates on January 25, Roland Hartkopf, Head of Production, Co-ordination & Projects for DB Schenker, acknowledged that much work remains before the freight sector can fully realise the potential of a liberalised, pan-European market.

Despite the best efforts of bodies such as RailNetEurope to facilitate cross-border freight services, Hartkopf announced bluntly that 'nobody really knows what an international path is, properly defined'.

'Open access is a widely-accepted term, but it has yet to be fully understood', he said. 'DB has been running open-access services for many years. We co-operate with our partners right across Europe - sometimes with the classic model of partnership alliances, such as we have with SNCF, and sometimes taking advantage of market liberalisation to launch new services, as we have with EuroCargoRail.'

He added that the development of both open-access and conventional freight services was being hindered by the difficulties in responding to the market.

Echoing concerns expressed elsewhere about the lack of progress in harmonising operating rules across national borders (RG 2.08 p95), he warned that the costs of running internationally would not be worthwhile if paths were not available to allow trains to run in accordance with customers' needs, citing as evidence the €30 000 cost of training and certifying a driver to work trains outside his home country for a year.

He added that freight was seen as a lower priority than passenger traffic on most routes, but 'as freight is very much a buyer's market', customers would not pay for trains to stop for long periods to change traction or exchange documentation between countries.

Future growth in the international freight sector will follow from high quality train planning in each domestic market, which can then be mapped onto the international timetable. 'A dedicated interface between the national and international planning processes will be essential if viable corridors are to be created across Europe for freight trains', Hartkopf insisted. He suggested that if 'a scientific approach' were adopted, more dedicated freight corridors could be realised alongside those already envisaged as part of the <acronym title="European Rail Traffic Management System">ERTMS</acronym> programme.

Without such a pan-European planning process, bringing together not only a timetable but also comprehensive data on a train's traction, weight and cargo, a Europe-wide network of dedicated freight routes would remain a pipe-dream, he feared.

What is Viriato?

Named after Viriathus, the Lusitanian warrior-hero who resisted the Roman invasion of western Iberia in the second century BC, the Viriato timetabling tool was launched by SMA und Partner AG in 1996 to meet growing demand from railway managers to integrate timetable and planning data on a single technology platform accessible to a host of different users. 'We wanted to put some intelligence behind the drawing of graphical timetables,' explained the company's Chief Executive Werner Stohler.

SMA designed Viriato to offer a broad spectrum of planning capabilities, ranging from strategic studies for new projects down to the granular assessment of an existing pinch-point.

'Viriato can be used to plot a possible timetable right at the outset', said Alexander Schaeffer, SMA's Marketing Director. 'That should then be used to influence the infrastructure design'. In keeping with its Portuguese heritage, Viriato was employed in the early stages of planning the Portuguese high speed master plan (RG 2.06 p85).

The challenge now is to ensure that Viriato evolves to reflect users' changing needs, both in terms of functionality (particularly regarding software compatibility and the visual interface) and deployment.

'Customers increasingly want to use Viriato for very short-term planning needs as well', noted Schaeffer, citing the Rhätische Bahn's use of the software to adapt its services for visitors to the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.

Information can be displayed in several formats depending on the user's needs, from tabular data through a graphical timetable to the 'netgraph' (above), a format developed by SMA that gives a schematic representation of a network and its timetable, representing all the routes and services in a network, together with their mutual relationships.

Data can be exported into Microsoft Excel format, and SMA is one of the founder members of the RailML initiative, aimed at standardising data exchange across the rail industry around a standard set of XML-derived feeds. SMA has a dedicated IT support centre to help clients integrate Viriato into their own technology systems as required.

According to Stohler, SMA's core markets remain in Europe, but the firm is looking to develop Viriato for the Chinese and Indian markets. 'Viriato is very international because it can be customised for each individual customer … but fundamentally, the train planning process is similar across the globe.'

'The interfaces of the network must be set in concrete. Only then can the competitive element be introduced'

Werner Stohler Chief Executive, SMA und Partner

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