Project Objectives

The EGNOS Controlled Railway Equipment (ECO-RAIL) project was one of several GNSS-1 Rail User Navigation Equipment projects dealing with the implementation of satellite navigation into the railway domain to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of GNSS.

The ECO-RAIL project was aimed at designing and testing a positioning system which is based on satellite navigation in a safety critical railway application. In order to show the benefit of the innovation, the project focused on the specific application of the control of automatic level crossings (ALX): Based on an on-board navigation unit employing multi-sensor technique, it is possible to activate an ALX via a radio link. Consequently, there is reduced need for cost-intensive track-side facilities, especially for positioning (e.g. track circuits, beacons) and for signal transmission (cables).

After the specification of requirements and technical delineation, the ECO-RAIL project  comprised the design and test of the on-board equipment as well as a demonstration on a pilot track in the Austrian province Upper-Austria. The demonstration aimed at the evaluation of the system performance, regarding the efficiency of the developed localisation compared to the existing hardwired localisation system.

Figure 1: The train determines its position autonomously and transmits an activation request to the control system. The control system closes the level crossing and triggers the information to pass.