In a step forward for Australia’s rail industry, infrastructure and transport ministers have decided on European Train Control Systems (ETCS) as the future technology pathway for National Network for Interoperability (NNI).
It will mean any digital train control and signalling system introduced on the NNI must comply with ETCS mandatory standards.
This is really positive. Great to see that this procurement harmonisation is extending to rolling stock as well.
ETCS has been less than successful in Europe especially in non-urban areas. Freight operators hate it Can’t see this working here either
I only see ETCS being installed primarily for the benefit of suburban rail services rather than freight. I’m sure that the legacy signalling will be in place for the purposes of freight operation if ETCS wouldn’t work will with freight.
It would benefit freight as Australia has a history of fatal freight accidents especially in NSW.
Not half of new railway cars equipped with ERTMS: ‘no business case’ | RailFreight.com
“The current situation is even worse than before the introduction of ETCS” - VibeWire Magazine
2025-03-20_AERRL-ALLRAIL-ERFA-TE-Position-paper-ETCS-FRMCS-final.pdf
After a brief glance at those articles, it sems to me that they have installed ETCS with the supposedly antiquated GSM-R, and that they would now have to work on upgrading ETCS to work with FRMCS.
Please tell me that Australia has considered the ETCS being installed to be able to seamlessly transition to FRMCS from GSM-R, considering that they have implemented ETCS at the time when FRMCS was going into fruition, and that GSM-R would become deprecated by 2030.
FRCMS is still in the infancy stage with pilot deployments.
But there is more to it. Its is extremely expensive to deploy and just not suited for the vast expanse of Australia non-urban network. Maintenance costs alone will be mind blowing let alone installation costs. There is no business case for freight.
Is this about ETCS or FRMCS?
If FRMCS is still in its infancy stage, when why would GSM-R be deprecated by 2030? Would you reckon that the 2G GSM-R be a more cost effective option as opposed to the 5G FRMCS? Would the benefits of FRMCS over GSM-R be worthwhile the larger expense? Edit: with GSM-R being deprecated within the next 5 years, I’m sure that the ETCS will be able to upgrade to FRMCS. FRMCS uses 5G which is much more responsive than the 2G of GSM-R and results in better safety within the network. So it could be worth the higher expense.
If this is about ETCS in general, it is definitely a big improvement over the legacy ‘traffic-light’ signalling that does not provide ATP. With trains being able to receive realtime position information about other trains within the vicinity, the driver will have a more accurate understanding about positions of other trains rather than eyeballing it with traffic light signals. Definitely a worth the large expense for the major safety improvement with ETCS.
It’s not the only technology that can do that
Just need trains to talk to both systems.