New National Automatic Train Protection System Approved for the Belgium Rail Network
The first in the industry to meet the Safety Integrity Level 4 (SIL4) standard for critical railway applications, iEVC-RailOS uses standard off-the-shelf computing hardware (iEVC) with TSC’s RailOS operating system, a highly efficient and secure real-time operating system.
A new nationalal automatic train protection system, the TBL1+, has been approved for the Belgian rail network.
The Signalling Company (TSC), part of the Škoda Group, has announced the certification and release of the first of its new national Class B automatic train protection solutions, TBL1+, for vehicles operating on the Belgian national rail network. The solution, designed and developed in close collaboration with Lineas, is based on TSC’s universal digital railway platform, iEVC-RailOS. The TSC team is also entering the certification phase of its ETCS solution, which is scheduled to be available in 2025.
“It is an important validation milestone for ourselves and our lead customer and close collaborator, Lineas. It marks the beginning of the series retrofit cycle for the Lineas HLD77 fleet that will see these locomotives installed, commissioned and returned to work with TBL1+. It will be done after ERA/DVIS authorisation. As the platform already incorporates BTM and Odometry functions, the fleet will be ready for a software-only upgrade to ETCS in 2025-2026. The certification of our ETCS solution should be ready during next year.”
The first in the industry to meet the Safety Integrity Level 4 (SIL4) standard for critical railway applications, iEVC-RailOS uses standard off-the-shelf computing hardware (iEVC) with TSC’s RailOS operating system, a highly efficient and secure real-time operating system.
“The release of TBL1+ marks the first step of the iEVC-RailOS vision shared and seeded by Lineas’ early investment in TSC. Now we can proceed with our retrofit program in the knowledge that we have a futureproof digital rail platform on board the HLD77 fleet; one that can be upgraded to support the ETCS Baseline 3 to 4 evolution and other applications during the fleet’s operational lifetime.”
“The vision is about breaking away from sole-supplier vehicle upgrades that drive the need for more hardware and software that is prohibitively expensive, consumes precious space, increases immobilization time of the locomotive, and increases maintenance cost. Instead, we now have a digital rail platform which consumes a tiny amount of space and is therefore easier to integrate and gives us access to ETCS and as many other applications that TSC or their RailOS certified development partners can provide.”
