All News articles – Page 371
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News
Variable supports speed Pendolino production
FACED with the need to turn out up to eight vehicles a week for Virgin’s West Coast Pendolino fleet, Alstom Transport has remodelled its assembly lines at Washwood Heath. At peak production, Pendolino cars will be moving down four parallel lines, and Alstom was keen to minimise intermediate handling.The car ...
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Pointers
n Look for the state government of New South Wales to announce plans for the privatisation of Freightcorp; the A$1bn sale has been approved in principle by the cabinet, and discussions with local rail unions are expected to start later this month.n Construction of a new commuter rail route in ...
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Publications
Rolling contact fatigue of railway wheelsby Anders EkbergHigher speeds and axleloads have tended to increase the forces acting on railway wheels. At the same time, reductions in curvature and bogie optimisation have tended to shift the main causes of wheel rim damage from wear to fatigue. In his doctoral thesis, ...
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SBB rethinks
SWISS Federal Railways is reviewing the level of service provided at stations. Ideas range from setting up a subsidiary to run stations with a travel agency and a full range of ticketing to franchise partnerships with Kuoni. Smaller stations may be run by third parties, and ’public stations’ ...
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Tilt TGVs to Toulouse
FRENCH National Railways is set to introduce tilting TGV services in 2005 on the Limousin route from Paris to Toulouse via Orléans and Limoges, following the signing of a financing agreement with the government and local regions. The deal was announced in Limoges on May 30 by Minister of Public ...
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Upset in Ukraine
THE FINDINGS of a team of government investigators into the running of the 22510 route-km broad gauge Ukrainian Railways network have caused a sensation. Following publication of a detailed report for the National Security Council, President Kuchma decided to take drastic action. The ensuing presidential decree demands nothing less than ...
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ZSR starts 160 km/h works
SLOVAK Republic Railways is to invest KS7·8bn this year on the modernisation of its international corridors, of which KS3bn will come from its own resources. In mid-April ZSR began work on the modernisation of the 39 km between Bratislava Raca and Trnava, which forms part of European Corridor V linking ...
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Six new lines in RDS2
HONG KONG is to get six more rail links by 2015, according to the long-awaited Second Railway Development Study which was published on May 16. Transport Secretary Nicholas Ng Wing-fui said the HK$80bn programme would see 70% of the population and 80% of all workplaces within 1 km of a ...
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Level 3 slips over the horizon
THE PRESENTATION in Madrid on April 25 to Loyola de Palacio of specifications setting out the functional and technical requirements for the European Rail Traffic Management System signals the success of initiatives launched in 1998 to rescue ERTMS and the GSM-R based European Train Control System from stagnation. As Vice-President ...
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Class 390 sets higher crashworthiness standards
BODYSHELLS to form Virgin Trains’ second Pendolino Britannico trainset are due to be shipped from the Italian port of Savona to Britain this month. Having started life in Fiat Ferroviaria’s plants in Italy, they will be taken for fitting out and final assembly to Alstom’s Birmingham plant, where the nine-car ...
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Capacity issues not addressed
NS REIZIGERS, which operates Dutch passenger trains, is in a bind. Traffic is at record levels and rising by 6% a year on the principal lines. It is currently negotiating a concession with the transport ministry, which is demanding ambitious growth rates at higher levels of punctuality while stalling on ...
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High speed enters the second age
INTRO: Another phase of new line construction is now firmly in sight as the benefits of high speed operation are recognised more widely. Murray Hughes finds that the pace of developments is hotting up againTEN YEARS ago on the morning of May 18 TGV Atlantique Set 325 streaked through Vend
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All in a name
SIX FORMER and current executives of Eurotunnel, including former Co-Chairman Sir Alastair Morton, who is now Chairman of Britain’s Shadow Strategic Rail Authority, have become mixed up in a French legal investigation instigated by a group of disgruntled Eurotunnel shareholders known as Adacte. This organisation is querying the financial forecasts ...
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Station systems automated
GERMAN Railway has adopted LonWorks networking technology to automate the management of station equipment and systems at its new Frankfurt Airport inter-city station. Escalators, lifts, fire alarms, smoke detectors, lighting and air-conditioning equipment are amongst over 1000 devices and 7000 data points connected to the network. There is a single ...
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Catalunya awards light rail DBOM
BARCELONA transport authority Autoritat del Transport Metropolita Spa announced on April 27 that it had selected the Group TramMet consortium for a 25-year concession to finance, design, build and operate a 16·8 km light rail line from Diagonal to Boix Llobregat. Promoted by ATM with the support of the Catalunya ...
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Single axles to speed postal vans
LAST MONTH, Swedish State Railway’s workshops and maintenance subsidiary TGOJ ordered 70 sets of TF25SA single axle suspensions from Powell Duffryn Rail for around £2m. Derived from the company’s TF25 ’track-friendly’ bogies (RG 11.99 p739), the suspensions are to be used to uprate SJ freight vans for 160 km/h operation ...
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SJ takes West Coast back
SWEDISH State Railway resumed operation of the West Coast corridor between G
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Ministers back base tunnel
MEETING in Modane on May 15, French Transport Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot and his Italian counterpart Pier-Luigi Bersani agreed to push ahead with work on the Mont Cenis base tunnel and the Lyon - Torino high-speed line as part of a programme to divert transalpine traffic from road to rail. Despite ...