The Czech company AŽD completed the full digitization of the Plum Railway between Obrnice and Čížkovice during operation. This is the first application of an intelligent railway with the designation 4.0 on the Czech infrastructure, which thus keeps up with modern world trends in the field of railway management and safety.
When AŽD bought the Plum Railway from the state in 2016, it aimed not only to restore daily operations, but also to make this regional railway a testing ground for its existing and developing technologies, including the commissioning of a modern digital railway. “For three years, we intensively developed, invested considerable funds, and then gradually installed technologies that, thanks to digital communication, now make up the intelligent railway 4.0. We are now verifying this from the point of view of safety, reliability and availability in the normal load of regular hourly traffic within the U10 line Litoměřice h.n. – Most,” says AŽD CEO Zdeněk Chrdle.
As part of the intelligent digital railway, all technologies produced by the AŽD company are operated in their most modern versions. The entire line is controlled from the technology centre in Třebívlice by fully electronic station interlocking system of the StationSWing ESA series. All stations including outdoor elements are safely controlled from this centre via distributed object controllers. Level Crossing systems are equipped with an intelligent peripherals and are remotely controlled from the centre. Conventional technologies are followed by a fully interoperable system of the unified train control system ETCS in levels L1 and L2 with automatic transitions between both levels. The entire line is covered by the GSM-R/GPRS radio system, and in the sections intended for testing autonomous trains without drivers, also by LTE and Wi-Fi. All operated systems are remotely controlled from the dispatcher’s centre in Lovosice under the central supervision of a diagnostic system based in AŽD headquarters building in Prague. Diagnostic information is available online from the data interfaces of the systems. The distribution of digitally processed traffic data to passenger information systems, intelligent stops or to mobile applications with the exact location of trains is a matter of course.
The technological development of the Plum Railway continues with the integration of other systems, such as ATO over ETCS (Automatic Train Operation under ETCS) working with real traffic data, continuous sensory track supervision using optical fibres, autonomous diagnostics of outdoor elements or the communication unit of cooperative management C- ITS for transmitting information about the state of level crossing systems to drivers in moving cars.
“AŽD is preparing for the first foreign installation of the intelligent digital railway 4.0 system as part of our new Hungarian order on the Szeged – Rözske line, which is an integral part of the extensive Szeged railway junction,” concludes Zdeněk Chrdle.
