All articles by Railway Gazette International – Page 1299
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Regional rail services will strengthen economic ties
INTRO: Specially-built trains are spearheading the development of local passenger services across the Øresund link. Danish State Railways and Swedish State Railways have pooled their resources with the aim of growing the business to 4·8 million passengers a year by 2005BYLINE: Bjørn WahlstenHead of Passenger DivisionDanish State RailwaysINTEGRATING the ...
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East and west
VISITING Spain last month with President Vladimir Putin, Russian Minister of Railways Nikolai Aksyonenko travelled to the Las Matas premises of Patentes Talgo to sign an agreement for a joint Spanish-Russian company. Destined to build gauge-convertible rolling stock for services between Russia and countries west of Belarus, the company will ...
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The Øresund fixed link: a job well done
BYLINE: Sven LandeliusManaging Director, Øresundsbro KonsortietFollowing a five-year construction period, the Øresund fixed link between Denmark and Sweden will open on July 1 2000. It is with great satisfaction that my colleagues and I can look back on a job well done. We have managed to plan, construct and finish ...
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Roissy-CDG link deal
ON JUNE 13 the presidents of French National Railways, Réseau Ferré de France and Aéroports de Paris signed an agreement to develop a high-speed rail link to Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle Airport (RG 4.00 p205). The three companies have set up a Groupement d’Intérêt économique known as CDG-Express, which will be headed by ...
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CTRL tunnel holed through
BRITAIN’s Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was the principal guest at a holing-through ceremony in the 3·2 km North Downs Tunnel on the 74 km Section 1 of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link on June 7. Railtrack Chief Executive Gerald Corbett also attended.Speaking before a roadheader broke through the final ...
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Europe's freight wall cracks
NINE years after European transport ministers gingerly opened the gate to liberalised rail services with the signing of Directive 91/440 in Luxembourg, open access entrepreneurs and companies with substantial rail business are starting to exploit the opportunities. As well they might, given that the International Union of Combined Road-Rail Transport ...
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Chinese east-west corridor starts
ON MAY 29 Chinese Railways officially inaugurated construction work on the 1129 km east-west trunk line between Nanjing and Xi’an, serving the Yangtze river valley. The line is a key part of the Ministry of Railway’s new strategy to open up corridors to western China (RG 4.00 p202). The intention ...
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Image processing checks wheels
ENGINEERS at the Taiyuan Railway Research Institute of Science & Technology in China have developed a system that uses image processing to measure wheel profiles in motion at speeds between 3 km/h and 6 km/h. Activated by a photoelectric switch, the trackside system illuminates the wheel with a slit light ...
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Customer centre opens
FASTER, BETTER and more cost effective management of freight services was promised by Swiss Federal Railways President Benedikt Weibel on May 25, when he inaugurated SBB Cargo’s new customer service centre (KSC) at Freiburg. Built at a cost of SFr22m, the centre will provide a single point of contact for ...
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Izmir celebrates metro start
WITH a fanfare of music and fireworks, the Mayor of Izmir Ahmet Piristina formally opened the first stage of the city's light metro network on May 22. Other participants in the celebrations included Trade & Industry Minister Kenan Tanrikulu, Finance Minister Sumer Oral, former Mayor Burhan Ozfatura, and Izmir ...
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Sloppy procedures caused Glenbrook crash
JUSTICE Peter McInerney criticises management for a collective failure to train and supervise operating staff in his report on the tail-end collision which killed seven and injured 51 at Glenbrook in New South Wales on December 2 1999 (RG 4.00 p212). He says 23 factors combined to cause the accident, ...
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Refurbished Corail cars finish the tour de France
ON JULY 7 a French National Railways demonstration train formed of five refurbished Corail coaches (RG 4.00 p209) will complete a tour of 39 cities. The last call will be Lyon after a four-month itinerary that took the train all over France, including three days visiting Paris termini at the ...
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LiREx explores car technology
LIGHTWEIGHT Innovative Regional Express is the name given to a speculative prototype being developed for the German Land of Sachsen-Anhalt by Alstom LHB of Salzgitter. Intended to test a range of new technologies, the diesel-powered LiREx shares several features with the København S-Bane EMUs. Bodies will be more than 3m ...
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Hungarian builders give MÁV coaches a second lease of life
COMFORT standards for commuters in Budapest are improving with a programme of coach refurbishment being carried out by Hungarian State Railways’ former workshops at Dunakeszi, now a joint venture known as Adtranz M
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Products In Brief
InfoVision Systems has been awarded a contract by Siemens Transportation Systems to supply technical documentation for the maintenance of Class 333 EMUs being delivered to British operator Northern Spirit (RG 5.00 p286). Documents including parts lists and training material will be accessed in electronic format by Siemens staff using InfoVision’s ...
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Expressway boost
CANADIAN Pacific subsidiary St Lawrence & Hudson held a brief inauguration ceremony in Montréal’s St Luc yard on June 7 to mark the entry into service of the company’s next generation of Expressway piggyback wagons. SL&H President Jacques C
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Siegen heads bogie division
ADTRANZ has chosen the Siegen plant in Germany to head its Bogies Product Unit, which employs a total of 900 people with an annual turnover of DM500m. Responsible for design as well as production undertaken at Derby (Great Britain), Helsingborg (Sweden) and Winterthur (Switzerland), Siegen has a workforce of 300 ...
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Balkan Talgo test
CROATIAN Railways has expressed interest in purchasing a fleet of five tilting trainsets to improve journey times on its inter-city routes from Zagreb to Split and Rijeka. HZ is currently looking for sources of finance for the investment. In co-operation with the commercial arm of the Spanish embassy in Zagreb, ...
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SSRA backs freight ideas
ON JUNE 13 Britain’s Shadow Strategic Rail Authority announced that three groups would share grants totalling £6m for development of innovative freight and logistics services.Blue Circle, Babcock Rail and Metalair Feldbinder have been awarded £2·9m to fund a two-year trial moving cement from Hope to Ipswich in 16 W6A gauge ...