FRANCE: In a presentation at the Alpine Rail Optimisation conference in Wien on November 8 Director of Wagon Management at SNCF Fret Nicolas Czernecki confirmed that the operator had become the first railway in Europe to implement automated brake testing on commercial freight trains.
Under a pilot programme for bulk customer Novacarb, by the end of the year SNCF expects to have up to 150 wagons equipped with digital devices for use in three block trains on which automated brake testing will be in use.
At the heart of this development is a partnership between SNCF and digital start-up Traxens, based in Marseille.
Traxens has fitted the wagons with remotely programmable digital devices which are connected wirelessly to sensors and actuators, allowing data to be transmitted within the train and to the cloud. The company says that around 5,000 wagons will be fitted by the end of 2018 and 15,000 by the end of 2019.
Read more at RailwayGazette.
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