The European railway industry faces great challenges in need for increased network capacity. Ageing infrastructure assets require efficient and sustainable interventions to maintain and improve current levels of performance. To meet these demands and increase the operational performance of the railway infrastructure assets, innovation is needed to enable a step-change in reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) and also to optimise asset capital and LCC. The IN2TRACK3 proposal addresses the topic of “Research into optimised and future railway Infrastructure” of the 2020 Horizon 2020 SHIFT2RIL call. The project is a continuation of IN2TRACK and IN2TRACK2 and aims to further develop and demonstrate research results and innovations developed. IN2TRACK3 will develop physical as well as digital technology and methodology demonstrators for the Track, Switches & Crossings and Bridge & Tunnel assets and the project is aligned to the SHIFT2RAIL overall aims. The project structure is designed around three technical sub-projects aiming at both improving the operational performance of existing infrastructure assets and providing radical new system solutions delivering a step-change in performance, improving methods and repair techniques, improve quality, reduce costs and extend the service life of assets and structures. The project is led by Trafikverket, the Swedish Transport Administration Agency, the consortium consists of 27 expert partners originating from 11 European countries and the partners involved are infrastructure managers, research partners, technology developers and industry partners. IN2TRACK3 will further develop and demonstrate a number of innovative solutions based upon the two previous projects and the work will build upon already ongoing mutually beneficial collaboration, established communication paths and a considerable amount of mutual trust built upon years of collaboration in international project environments.

The railway sector is currently acting in a fragmented way and in silos, corresponding most often to physical or functional subsystems or use cases, and the different owners/managers of the overall infrastructure at regional/national level, without global extensive view or full control of the global system involved by rail operations. With the progress of digitization, analogue devices based on relays were progressively substituted by digital ones, and it is more and more evident that enabling the communication between already existing digital tools for various subsystems can be beneficial. What is missing is an efficient, automated and standardized way for these integrated and interplaying systems to act as one ecosystem: sharing, integrating, identifying, correlating and exploiting the right data at the right time. In order to meet these challenges, the objective of LinX4Rail is to develop and promote within Shift2Rail framework and beyond, a sectorial common Functional Railway System Architecture. It will be supported by a widely adopted Shift2Rail Conceptual Data Model (CDM) that will, with the commitment of the Shift2Rail members, through Shift2Rail Programme Board Change Management Process, establish the standard for interactions between legacy and new systems and thus ensure sustainable interoperability between systems. The ambition of LinX4Rail is to achieve a comprehensive approach for the CDM, global system modelling specification and a strategy for implementation of technological breakthroughs, including RCA, with the inputs from a communication system perspective and give a vision of future evolution of Functional Railway System Architecture.

The European transport manufacturing industries are currently well positioned with competitive products of high quality on the worldwide market. However, global economic shifts, societal trends and environmental challenges may put their leadership role into question. For companies and policy makers to anticipate the challenges, to identify conceivable enablers and hurdles for counteraction, and to conclude on effective push ore pull measures, the current state and the future development paths of the European transport manufacturing industries have to be thoroughly investigated. The Coordination and Support Action “Scoreboard of Competitiveness of the European Transport Manufacturing Industry” (SCORE) will explore, assess and forecast how progress in research and development, new innovative technologies and future demand changes in combination with forthcoming geopolitical and geo-economic developments will affect the global competitive position of the European transport manufacturing industry. The analyses will focus on the four major transport manufacturing industry’s segments automotive, aeronautical, ship-building and rail rolling stock, all for carriage of passengers and freight, and has a time horizon up to 2030 (and partly to 2050). Based on these assessments, several development scenarios will be elaborated in order to compare competitiveness evolution for each of the industry segments. The findings will be summarized and visualized in a so called scoreboard that indicates in an easily accessible way the current and future competitive position of the European transport manufacturing industries compared to their global rivals. Subsequently orientations for adjustments, changes, and expansions of corporate innovation, production and investment strategies, EU industrial competitiveness policies and other measures will be provided. For verification and validation, the SCORE project will seek extensively the assessments from an Industrial Advisory Board.

Two major issues of secondary lines rail transport are need to change the train for many destinations and to be bound to a timetable. Pods can be used to adopt rail transport better to the users demand by higher flexibility and efficiency as well as realising on-demand rail transport. The Project Pods4Rail aims to develop a concept for Pods and Pod-Carriers on Railway in order show the approach. Pod-carriers are serving as a moving infrastructure and the pods are loaded and locked on them for the transport. The main focus in Pods4Rail is the rail pod-carrier, which is presented in detail. Nevertheless, Pod-Carrier for Road and Ropeways are taken into consideration on a conceptual level to ensure the transferability of the concept. Related use cases and business cases are identified and analysed.

IN2RAIL is to set the foundations for a resilient, consistent, cost-efficient, high capacity European network by delivering important building blocks that unlock the innovation potential that exists in SHIFT2RAIL: innovative technologies will be explored and resulting concepts embedded in a systems framework where infrastructure, information management, maintenance techniques, energy, and engineering are integrated, optimised, shared and exploited. IN2RAIL will make advances towards SHIFT2RAIL objectives: enhancing the existing capacity fulfilling user demand; increasing the reliability delivering better and consistent quality of service; reducing the LCC increasing competitiveness of the EU rail system. To achieve the above, a holistic approach covering Smart Infrastructures, Intelligent Mobility Management (I2M)and Rail Power Supply and Energy Management will be applied. Smart Infrastructure addresses the fundamental design of critical assets - switches and crossings and tracks. It will research components capable of meeting future railway demands and will utilise modern technologies in the process. Risk and condition-based LEAN approaches to optimise RAMS and LCC in asset maintenance activities will be created to tackle the root causes of degradation. I2M researches automated, interoperable and inter-connected advanced traffic management systems; scalable and upgradable systems, utilising standardised products and interfaces, enabling easy migration from legacy systems; the wealth of data and information on assets and traffic status; information management systems adding the capability of nowcasting and forecasting of critical asset statuses. Rail Power Supply and Energy Management create solutions to improve the energy performance of the railway system. Research on new power systems characterised by reduced losses and capable of balancing energy demands, along with innovative energy management systems enabling accurate and precise estimates of energy flows.