Investigators in Germany are testing a satellite navigation system that promises faster, safer freight transport on Europe's railways. All they needed to perform the trials were eight fake satellites and one mock 86-acre rail yard.
The European Union claims their Galileo satellite navigation system -- a competitor and complement to the US' Global Positioning System and Russia's GLONASS-- is so accurate that it can be used to implement an automated train control (ATC) system at railyards. With ATC, individual freight cars can automatically be classified onto appropriate trains, saving time and decreasing the possibility of railyard accidents.
There's only one problem: Galileo won't be ready for another four years. As a result, engineers at Siemens had to create a reasonable facsimile of the system in order to test their ATC technology.
Siemens' RailGATE project (GATE is an acronym for "application center for ground transportation" in German) is taking place on 17 miles of faux railway at the company's Wegberg-Wildenrath testing facility (shown above). "The aim is to explore potential applications for the future Galileo satellite system in rail-bound transportation and to make it even more reliable in future," the company said in a statement.
In order to simulate the signals from the Galileo satelite, Siemens built eight signal generators they call "pseudolites" which transmit the same signals that trains would receive from Galileo. During the trial, trains are being shunted and classified in a series of test tracks that mimic real-world applications, such as in a busy depot with multiple arriving trains or in a wooded forest where reception may be blocked.
Should the tests be successful they may revitalize the EU's rail freight, a sector of transport where Europe lags behind much of the rest of the world. Freight transit by rail has declined from a high of 21 percent in 1970 to a low of 8 percent in 1998. The European Commission White Paper on Transit envisions a world where Galileo and ATC lead a shift in freight transit from funny-looking flat-front trucks to relatively more efficient trains.
Photo: Siemens AG. The Wegberg-Wildenrath testing facility now features eight "pseudolites" to test the EU's incomplete Galileo global satellite navigation system.
