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.

LUBGEAR aims at demonstrating gear design solutions which can withstand off-design conditions in geared turbofans without additional means (secondary/auxiliary lubrication). Those solutions combine 1) optimized gear geometry providing low power loss conditions; and 2) Surface and material combinations providing low friction. The solutions aim at reducing friction losses and frictional heat, leading to reduced temperatures and risk of scoring. This will allow producing gears which do not face catastrophic damage even under loss of lubrication in off-design conditions. An investigation of new enabling technologies regarding off-design conditions will be carried out in simulation and experiment at contact level (TRL2). The combination of material systems (roughness, coating and hardening), contact load, sliding speed, rolling speed, lubricant type and lubricant supply will be considered through a Design of Experiments, allowing LUBGEAR to create a unique database and extend contact modelling tools. Gear Design Optimisation takes into account the results from contact level and derives solutions coming from geometry, material systems, operating conditions and passive lubrication. A demonstration of the most promising design and technology solutions for gears will be validated in an experimental component test rig at TRL3 level. Gear modelling addresses the predictive design of off-design conditions. LUBGEAR project gathers 4 strategic partners based on a multidisciplinary approach combining uniquely engineering, tribology, mechanics and advanced chemistry. This will allow developing a gear design with an increase of over 100 % in scoring load and a reduction of over 50 % of frictional losses resulting in remarkable improvements in loss of lubrication conditions. LUBGEAR will assess the benefits of different gear designs including gear geometry, new material systems and passive lubrication technologies in reaching the efficiency and load capacity required for gearboxes.

The FR8RAIL project proposal is submitted as part of the Shift2Rail Research and Innovation Action. Within the FR8RAIL project proposal there are eighteen European partners. The main aim of the FR8RAIL project proposal is the development of functional requirements for a sustainable and attractive European rail freight. These objectives of FR8RAIL are: A 10 % reduction in the cost of freight transport measured by tonnes per Km. A 20 % reduction in the time variations during dwelling and increase attractiveness of logistic chains by making available 100 % of the rail freight transport information to logistic chain information systems. The objectives of the FR8RAIL project will be achieved by developing a number of vital areas within freight rail. There are six main areas of work that form the backbone of this proposal’s approach in achieving the development of functional requirements for a sustainable and attractive European rail freight. The work areas are 1) Business Analytics, KPIs, Top Level Requireme

Within the challenges highlighted in the IP5 part of the S2R Master Plan, FR8RAIL II further focuses on improving the freight eco system by addressing various challenges: New automatic couplers (1), provided with electrical and data transmission functionalities will massively improve the efficiency of the train composition process, new telematics and electrification (2) will enable Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) by collecting, transmitting and using the necessary information while being supplied with the required energy by means of an advanced energy management system. Improved methods for annual and short-term timetable planning (3) will help traffic operators increasing the overall capacity and raise punctuality and with Real-time network management (4), integrating medium to short-term and operational planning at yards/terminals and in the railway network, inefficiencies will be further reduced or even eliminated. Future freight wagon design (5) is a stream that will contribute in improving reliability of the freight transport while increasing the payload per meter of train. The latter one will be propelled by future main line electric freight locomotives featuring highly flexible freight propulsion (6) systems with reduced operational costs. Furthermore, these new freight trains will be propelled by more than one locomotive running with distributed power (7), thus allowing long freight trains up to 1,500 m. Last but not least, focus is given to driver advisory aystems that are connected (C-DAS) to the traffic management systems (8), further enhancing capacity, improving punctuality and optimize energy consumption of the railway system. Summarizing, FR8RAIL II focuses on various facets of the freight eco system with one goal: overall improvement and increase of competitiveness of the rail freight transport.