SWISS Federal Railways (SBB) has announced the successful completion of tests to remotely control an electric locomotive. Working in partnership with Alstom, a number of test movements were carried out in February and March.
The purpose of the tests was to determine whether drivers could remotely move a defective train to a safe place using automatic train operation (ATO). A total of 24 freight and passenger drivers based in a control room at Zurich Oerlikon controlled an electric shunting locomotive in Zurich’s Mülligen marshalling yard.
These are some of the first tests in Europe that were carried out in real-life conditions in a marshalling yard rather than on a section of track separated from the rest of the network.
An Alstom-developed remote control panel was used by the drivers. Similar to a simulator control panel, the images on the screens are live feeds from a number of cameras installed on the locomotive. The locomotive was driven remotely at speeds of up to 30km/h. During the test drives, a driver and driver manager were both onboard the locomotive and were ready to intervene and stop the locomotive at any stage.
Mr Beat Rappo, project manager for the remote control test drives, says the tests were completed successfully: “As 24 colleagues took part in the test drives we received a large volume of useful feedback, which is invaluable to us for the further development of the technology,” he says.
The role that human factors play, and how the participating drivers could imagine themselves really driving the locomotive, were studied by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) as part of the test drives.
SBB is looking to deploy remote control for a variety of uses, including tunnel maintenance work or at overnight engineering work sites where only short movements are required. However, SBB says it does not expect ATO to be put into regular use for several years.
As the results of the test movements are analysed, an interim and final report will be created and made available to the Swiss Federal Office of Transport (OFT). The tests were completed under the Horizon Europe programme Europe’s Rail Innovation Pillar and were funded from the OFT and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).
Further SBB ATO projects
SBB intends to examine various ATO projects over the next few years. These include:
Automatic acceleration and braking for freight trains (expected from 2025)
Automatic starting of trains (expected at the end of 2024/beginning of 2025), and
Signal and obstacle assistance perception systems (expected at the end of 2024/beginning of 2025).
The planned tests will check that the current European draft standards are applicable in Switzerland in order to ensure that future standards can be seamlessly implemented.
The post Swiss Federal Railways tests ATO-controlled locomotive appeared first on International Railway Journal.
