At the beginning of the year, people tend to reflect. What was good, what was bad, what needs to be changed, what can and should be taken forward into the new year?
I have been running training courses on advanced train control for more than eleven years. One thing that helped me during that time was the slow innovation speed of the railway signalling industry. It allows to build educational programs that almost seem timeless. Much if not most of the content of my flagship training on CBTC, today called CBTC Masterclass, is still the same as it was in 2014 when I started CBTC training under the brand CBTC Kickstarter. The course content has evolved over the years, to improve the learning outcome. There was a need for some update, mainly due to changes in the supply industry, with some CBTC suppliers being taken over by others and product portfolios being merged. And of course, there was a big change from the developments in China with the issuing of interoperable CBTC standards. But the basic functions of CBTC, the common architecture of CBTC systems, the radio communication with the comparison of Wi-Fi versus LTE (or 5G in the near future) – all this has remained pretty much the same.
For ETCS, this was slightly different. And I dare say an important reason for that was that ETCS just did not work as flawlessly as CBTC. See, for CBTC, the oldest available standard, IEEE 1474 part 1, has not changed for sixteen years. It is admittedly high-level, but it works. Products available in the global market are compliant with functional and performance requirements. Applications are largely successful if the railway environment is suitable to reap the benefits that CBTC can bring. Things are looking good.

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