For anyone who is involved with modern signalling in Europe, the term ‘interoperability’ has a clear association with ERTMS (the European Rail Traffic Management System) and ETCS (the European Train Control System).

The idea of ETCS (one of the subsystems that make up ERTMS, the other is GSM-R radio) is to replace many legacy systems for Automatic Train Protection (ATP) across European states with one harmonised technology so that trains fitted with the onboard subsystem of ETCS can operate seamlessly on any railway line that is equipped with a trackside subsystem of ETCS.

This theoretical concept has some niggly practical details and is not quite as straightforward as the inventors of ETCS would have wished, but this was discussed in previous articles and is not today’s topic.

Today, I want to take a wider, more general view of interoperability. Because while ETCS might be the go-to approach for European mainline railways, what about interoperability of or with other systems, CBTC, for example? (CBTC stands for Communications-Based Train Control, in case you forgot this acronym.) We had that situation in Australia, where across the vast country, different railways were about to apply three different train control technologies, including ETCS and CBTC, and solutions for all kinds of potential combinations might have been required.

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