All articles by Railway Gazette International – Page 1303
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Products in Brief
Road-rail track maintenance vehicles being adapted from ERF road vehicles by Harsco Track Technologies for British infrastructure maintenance companies are now being fitted with control equipment supplied by Siemens Automation & Drives. The range includes Simatic S7-200 programmable logic controllers, Simatic HMI TP27 BERO inductive sensors, and 3SB1 push buttons.Ultrasonic ...
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Industry in Brief
Australia: Evans Deakins Industries has agreed to purchase the Powerlines, Telecommunications & Railways division of ABB for A$25m. PTR has maintenance contracts for rail installations in Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales, with a turnover of A$110m a year.British-based Rail Training International and French simulator manufacturer Corys jointly took ...
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Passenger in Brief
Rail Gourmet has acquired 40% of SSG Speisewagen AG, the rail catering business of Passaggio Holding, which has long-term contracts with SBB and other Swiss railways, creating a new company Passaggio Rail AG. Passaggio will start to replace SSG as a brand name when SBB’s new Bistro cars are introduced ...
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Bremen plans dual-mode LRT
CONSULTANTS have recommended a two-stage programme to launch through running of Bremen tram services onto regional rail routes. Depending on the size of the dual-mode network, traffic is estimated to increase by up to 50%.Because through running can be introduced at relatively low cost on routes serving Nordenham and Oldenburg, ...
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Branches under threat
IT WAS DISINGENUOUS of German Railway Chairman Hartmut Mehdorn to imply at DB’s 1999 annual results press conference on May 10 in Berlin (p333) that Austrian Federal Railways’ announcement the previous day about plans to withdraw rail services from a quarter of its 5653 km network pointed the way ahead. ...
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Invensys sells Westinghouse Brakes
INDUSTRIAL conglomerate Invensys plc - formed last year through the merger of BTR and Siebe - announced on April 25 that it had decided to sell its Westinghouse Brakes business units to Knorr-Bremse of Germany, for an aggregate cash consideration of £65m. Based at Chippenham in Great Britain and Sydney ...
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Spending bonanza levels off
INTRO: Although investment may have passed its peak as North America's railways complete capacity enhancement programmes, spending levels remain high following recognition that deferral of expenditure on infrastructure and motive power is a false economy. Julian Wolinksy reports THE HEADLONG rush of capital spending by North America's Class ...
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Big projects are poised to go
INTRO: In this comprehensive guide to spending plans and projects in Australia, Mark Carter finds that more than A$8bn will be committed in 2000-01, with the possibility of that figure doubling in the short to medium termIN A COUNTRY not known for its commitment to rail investment, the short to ...
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NS starts ’basic service’ trials
FOLLOWING last year’s decision to withdraw staff from its smaller stations, Netherlands Railways is beginning trials at 12 locations of the basic facilities that are to be provided. After consultation with consumer groups, NS has designed a ’service unit’ that combines ticket vending and money-changing machines, a timetable poster, an ...
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Madrid - Barcelona race
SPANISH National Railways announced on May 10 that five groups had registered to supply between 26 and 40 high speed trains for the 350 km/h line from Madrid to Barcelona. Renfe is evaluating the proposals and will shortly issue a formal invitation to bid, giving suppliers three months to respond. ...
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Ballastless track on TGV-Méditerranée
FRENCH engineering groups Travaux de Sud Ouest and Société Européenne de Travaux Ferroviaires last month completed laying ballastless track through the 7·8 km tunnel that will carry TGV Méditerranée on the approaches to Marseille, using a new design of vibration-absorbing twin-block sleeper developed by Sateba.The SAT S312NAT design has two ...
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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 ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 ...