"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," stated Simon Atterwell, Director, Network Rail Telecom.
"The program also provides the opportunity to explore additional railway applications such as GPS location data for train positioning location and the trial of a track remote condition monitoring application. We look forward to working closely with train and freight operating companies, and Siemens Mobility, in the delivery of this nationally important program," Atterwell added.
"We're proud to support one of the Great Britain's largest rail networks with the latest communication upgrades. With digitalization, we're enabling Network Rail's intelligent infrastructure and increasing value sustainably over the lifecycle of the radios. The system will not only improve communications, but also has the potential for sustainability benefits as well," stated Michael Peter, CEO of Siemens Mobility.
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.
For further information about Siemens Mobility, please see:
www.siemens.com/mobility