InnoTrans. Held every two years in Berlin, it is billed as “the world’s leading business meeting place for transport technology”. But, just how big is it? It’s big enough to encompass about 2,500 exhibitors and 110,000 trade visitors. There are representatives from 47 countries spread over 81,000 square metres of...

As a railway civil engineer, one of my greatest concerns related to the condition of the earthworks on my patch. A failure of an embankment or cutting slope could cause severe risks to the safety and operational integrity of the railway under my care. For engineers on the UK rail...

Bogies have featured a few times in the rail engineer recently. There were two articles on bogie production at the Siemens factory in Graz (issues 90 and 91, April and May 2012), and bogies and wheelsets featured in a two part article by Stuart Marsh (issues 93 and 94,...

Twenty five years ago, the operational telecommunications systems for the Channel Tunnel were being planned and designed. Radio systems were very important in this provision for, as well as providing continuous communication with the trains, there was need to reliably communicate with all the personnel who worked in the...

The President of the Institution of Civil Engineers is elected annually. One of the post’s key roles is to promote the profession to the public, making the President the highest-profile civil engineer in the country. In order to find out more, the rail engineer despatched editor Grahame Taylor, himself a...

With so much written on the subject, rail industry innovation is a hot topic. In his 2011 report, Sir Roy McNulty raised the profile of rail innovation, estimating that it could generate between 18% and 26% of the total savings he identified. the rail engineer has featured many articles...

The Technology Strategy Board (TSB) provides a good example of cross-industry innovation within the UK. But what of innovation across a global rail industry? the rail engineer was recently offered an opportunity to talk to Martin Ertl, Bombardier’s chief innovation officer, and learn how Bombardier Transportation is driving innovation...

Nord France Invest (NFI), the economic development agency for Northern France has done its sums. And from the Lille Region point of view they are very encouraging. They’ve worked out that they have direct access to Europe’s largest concentration of consumers, providing a marketplace population of 78 million with a...

Bombardier is a name now well established in the rail industry, but that was not always the case. Joseph Bombardier started the company in Canada to make snow mobiles during the 1930s, and this was the mainstream business for many years. The company entered the rail sector during the 1970s,...

Australia is the world’s sixth largest country by area, just behind Brazil and twice the size of India. And with a population of just 22 million (Brazil has 192 million while India boasts a whopping 1.2 billion), its cities and communities are quite widely spaced. This vast area and the...

Every two years, the world’s railway industry gathers on the outskirts of Berlin for InnoTrans. Billed as the “world’s leading trade fair for rail transport technology”, it attracts exhibitors and visitors from all over the world. The exhibition is vast, and the numbers are impressive. Last held in September 2010,...

Linking Devon with Cornwall across the river Tamar, the single track Royal Albert Bridge is of strategic importance, being the only remaining mainline rail link into Cornwall. If it were to be out of action, then the Royal Duchy rail network would be cut off from the rest of...