Benelux
Infrabel’s pioneering work on infrastructure PPPs such as the Liefkenshoek rail tunnel has been widely lauded, although it says the scope for further PPPs is limited.
interesting company to the markets,” he says. “Standard & Poor and Moody’s have given us a similar credit rating to the Belgian state, even with the debt we have inherited from SNCB Holding, so I believe we will have easy access to the markets. We don’t plan to increase our debt, but we do want to refinance existing debt and try to reduce it.” Smeets sees new commercial opportunities for Infrabel in the IT and telecoms functions it has taken over from SNCB Holding. “This transfer allows us to develop these activities a bit more and consider what services we could offer to the market,” he says. “Infrabel has a major cable network and while most of the capacity is used internally we could develop new activities using spare capacity. It won’t be a major activity, but there are certainly opportunities.”
Investment The 2013-2025 investment plan
approved by the federal government last July allocates more than ƒ1bn per year to Infrabel over the next decade for investment in the network, with a focus on renewing signalling systems and concentration of signalboxes to improve
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on-time performance and safety. “Safety is a key priority for this period and there is a lot of emphasis on modernising signalling systems,” says Smeets. “We want to be a European leader in ERTMS.” ƒ5.2bn is allocated to investment in safety during this period, including ƒ2.3bn for ETCS and the Transmission Balise Locomotive driving aid system (TBL1+), and this will allow Infrabel to complete the national ERTMS rollout by 2022 (IRJ March 2013 p39). In the meantime, the implementation of the TBL1+, which has already contributed to a significant fall in the number of signals passed at danger, will be fully completed by the end of 2015 By the end of 2012 all key junctions on the Belgian rail network were equipped with TBL1+.
.
Over the next decade train control will be increasingly centralised on a small number of signalling centres, a process that is already underway. The number of signalboxes has been more than halved in the last decade, from 368 in 2005 to 180 last year, and this process will continue with train control being concentrated at 31 locations by the end of 2016 and just 10 by 2022. Infrabel is also working to improve
safety at level crossings, building on the ƒ23m invested in its crossing modernisation and removal programme in 2012. The number of level crossings on the Belgian network fell from 1879 at the end of 2011 to 1857 at the end of 2012.
The increasing automation of infrastructure is expected to drive new approaches to asset management, and Smeets anticipates a shift towards a more preventative maintenance regime. “Increasingly data is being handled centrally, which allows better planning and organisation of maintenance work and gives us a much better understanding of the condition of our assets,” says Smeets. “I think our organisational structure will have to evolve to take profit of new ways of working. This is a transition that is underway in other countries and I’m confident it will happen in Belgium, and it will result in much better coordination of maintenance activities in the future.”
No more PPPs?
A key development over the last decade was the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) to implement
IRJ January 2014
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