BOMBARDIER has enhanced the capabilities of the Computer Aided Rail Design software which it uses to identify the most cost-effective way of planning signalling infrastructure on light rail and metro projects.

CARD is widely used when preparing the company’s bids for urban rail projects, and has been used in the development of proposals for Izmir, Manila, Stockholm, Bucuresti, Madrid and Roma. The package can now import route data from spreadsheets, and has been expanded to handle more complex track layouts as well as unlimited route lengths and numbers of trains.

Train performance data is entered for the stock to be used - CARD can cope with different types of rolling stock sharing tracks, taking into account curves, gradients, speed restrictions and specified maximum acceleration and deceleration rates. There is a display of the location of stops, points and other features, as well as a dynamic representation of the trains with their positions, speeds and stopping distances.

Theoretical and practical headways can be tested using CARD, allowing comparisons of the capacity and funding implications of different signalling schemes and identification of the most cost-effective way of achieving a designed specification; the results can be printed for third-party analysis.

Bombardier, Sweden

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