The Digirail project participated in the Rata 2025 event held for the railway industry in Tampere Hall, where our specialists presented the key themes and progress of the project. We will be presenting the content of the speeches made by the Digirail people in a series of articles called “Lessons learnt in the Rata 2025 event”.
“Utilisation of modern technology solutions has been at the core of the Digirail project from the very beginning. The project has sought to identify technological trends to avoid solutions that prove out to be temporary. This long-term approach has resulted in Digirail not only following the development, but leading the way for the entire railway sector,” the project leaders Jari Pylvänäinen and Juha Lehtola stated in their presentation.
The presentation provided a view into the concrete issues that make Digirail a technological pioneer and trendsetter for the whole of Europe.
Digirail is the first in Europe to test the new solutions
Over the past few years, Digirail has made a number of procurements, deploying technological solutions that have not yet been implemented elsewhere in Europe.
A Finnish company Mipro Oy is to supply the Object Controller (OC) for the first commercial track section (EKA) on the Tampere-Pori/Rauma line. The object controller is a device used in railway systems for managing and controlling external equipment, such as points, signals and other trackside equipment. The OC system acts as a kind of intermediary between the Centralised Safety System (CSS) and the trackside equipment.
The object controller will be based on the Eulynx interface, which is the open interface’s path towards the European Train Control System, the ETCS architecture. The Centralised Safety System will be supplied by Siemens Oy, making the Eulynx interface the first in Europe to be tested with different equipment suppliers.
Digirail utilises new and modern technological solutions
With the Hybrid Train Detection (HTD) solution, blocks can be implemented programmatically. For HTD to work safely, Train Integrity Monitoring (TIM) is essential, as programmatic blocks cannot physically detect if a wagon or wagons are left behind. HTD brings significant capacity benefits without requiring all trains to be equipped with a TIM system.
“In the future, it will be relatively easy to move from HTD to a system where track vacancy monitoring is completely discontinued and blocking based on train positioning is introduced,” says Juha Lehtola.
With Digirail, the infrastructure will be built to be prepared for the ATO GoA2 system, which is already being tested on the Tampere-Pori/Rauma track section. ATO GoA2 means that there is still a driver on board the train, but their tasks are limited to the train’s departure and unlocking of the doors, while automated functions are responsible for driving and stopping.
Digirail is piloting a new radio network solution
The intention on Digirail’s EKA track section on the Tampere-Pori/Rauma line is to use a radio network solution to communicate with trains by utilising commercial network connections. The solution has been developed because, unlike other countries, Finland has been granted an EU exemption to use Finland’s Public Authority Network (Virve) for railway communications instead of a GSM-R network. The exemption is granted until the FRMCS is deployed. Building a new, separate 5G-standard communications network solely for rail traffic would cost hundreds of millions of euros.
The implementation on the EKA track is intended to show that the solution piloted in Digirail can also be implemented elsewhere in Europe.
“All these factors combined has resulted in Digirail progressing towards a modern technical railway system for commercial use. The decisions made are based on Finland’s needs, and the entire sector supports the project’s progress. This has attracted interest elsewhere in Europe, as Finland has boldly taken the lead. Digirail is not only following developments closely, but is also building the future and leading the way forward for the entire railway sector,” says Jari Pylvänäinen.
