News
Spain announces response to Santiago disaster S
Fernando Puente Correspondent
PANISH development minister Mrs Ana Pastor
has announced a range of measures aimed at improving safety across the whole rail network after the accident at Santiago de Compostela on July 26, which left 79 dead and dozens injured. Although the technical
investigation now being carried out by CIAF, the body responsible for the investigation of railway accidents in Spain, will take several weeks, the government has recognised that the main factors behind the crash were driver error, and the lack of working ETCS equipment. Speaking before the Parliament transport committee Pastor stated that a thorough inspection of the high-speed network is underway to identify points where conditions similar to those behind the Santiago crash may occur. This process will lead to the installation of conventional fixed signals indicating the maximum permitted speed, which were absent on the section of line where the accident occurred, and to the installation of Asfa balises to limit speeds on the approach to sharp curves. The national automatic train protection (ATP) system was
designed in the 1970s to protect trains from passing signals at danger, but will now also be used to enforce permanent speed restrictions at specific locations, such as the Santiago curve. Pastor did not clarify, though, the reasons for the lack of functioning onboard ETCS equipment on the class 730 set which derailed in Santiago, nor the role that this could have played in the accident. Trackside ETCS is operable
on the Ourense - Santiago high- speed line, but Renfe class 730 sets operate exclusively on
Chinese rail investment to reach Yuan 600bn this year
C
HINA Railway Corporation (CRC), the state-owned body that has assumed
responsibility for the commercial activities of the former Ministry of Railways (IRJ August p18), has announced a plan to raise fixed-asset investment to Yuan 660bn ($US 97.88bn) this year to boost railway construction. The new investment total is Yuan 10bn more
than the investment target announced earlier this year and follows a Yuan 261.7bn investment in fixed railway assets in the first seven months of the year, a 16% increase year-on-year. CRC says around 5500km of new railway lines
will be placed into operation by the end of 2013 bringing the size of the conventional network to approximately 103,500km, while the high-speed network will exceed 10,000km.
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Asfa on this route even though they are equipped with ETCS, and operate under this system on the Madrid - Olmedo high- speed line. Although the curve where
the accident happened is not equipped with ETCS, the final ETCS balise on the high-speed line, located 4km from the crash site, would inform the driver (if ETCS is operational on the train) that the train is exiting an ETCS section, obliging him to acknowledge that situation and thus provide indirect information about the actual position of the train. Trains operating on the
Albacete - Alicante line, Spain’s newest high-speed line, which opened in June, currently run exclusively on Asfa as ETCS is still being tested. Senior industry sources suggest that ETCS will be commissioned within the next few months, and point to the fact that the line was opened prematurely. Other measures proposed
by Pastor include tightening rules on the use of phones by drivers (an incoming call could have been a contributing factor to driver error in this case), and improved ticketing and passenger counting systems.
Amur - Yakutsk Mainline nears completion R
USSIAN construction company Transstroy announced on August
15 that it expects to complete construction on the final section of the Amur - Yakutsk Mainline (AYAM) in the Far East of the country by the end of next month. The 809km line from Berkakit to
Tommot and Yakutsk includes 94 bridges, nine of them more than 100m in length. The line will terminate at Nizhny Bestyakh on the opposite bank of the wide Lena river to Yakutsk, although there are plans to construct a bridge upstream where the river narrows to extend the line into the city. In the peak years of construction,
the federal government, Russian Railways (RZD) and the Sakha republic. As well as connecting the Sakha
capital Yakutsk to the national network, providing reliable year- round transport links to the city, the railway will also provide access to the region’s vast mineral deposits.
IRJ September 2013
around 123km of track was laid per year and Transstroy says the line cost around Roubles 110m ($US 3.3m) per km to build, significantly below the Russian average of Roubles 200-250m per km, despite the challenging geological and climatic conditions. The project has been financed by
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