The trains operated by České dráhy will be equipped by the European Train Control System (ETCS), as the carrier has succeeded in filing its application for a subsidy from the EU funds.
České dráhy will equip 99 railway vehicles with a mobile part of the ETCS Level 2 European Train Control System. Thanks to communication between the track-based and train control equipment it will be possible to achieve further improvement of safety on Czech railway lines. The carrier was successful with its application for a support within the framework of the 2nd call of the CEF Programme of the European Union.
The Connecting Europe Facility (hereinafter referred to as “CEF”) serving for interconnection of Europe is focused on the funding of selected activities in the field of power engineering infrastructure, telecommunications and transport. Within the framework of the supported period 2014 – 2020, an amount of EUR 24,050,582,000 is allocated for the transport sector for all the Member States, and EUR 11,305,500,000 of this sum has already been transferred from the Cohesion Fund and will be spent exclusively on the needs of the Member States which are eligible to draw financial means from the Cohesion Fund. The CEF Programme is administered, on the basis of a Decision of the European Commission, by the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA) having its registered office in Brussels.
České dráhy, a.s., has been successful with its application for a subsidy in the CEF programme concerning the project entitled “Implementation of on-board components of the ERTMS/ETCS system complying with the basic standard 3 in vehicles of České dráhy, a.s., on the CNC corridors”. The Amendment no. 2 was signed on 10 September 2019 to the Grant Agreement, laying down the terms and conditions of the project implementation, including determination of the amount of the subsidy provided, which is to correspond to 85% of the total eligible costs of the project, i.e. it will not exceed EUR 21,196,349.70 EUR. The remaining 15% of eligible costs and other non-eligible costs will be financed from České dráhy’s own resources.
The historically introduced and still used train control systems in individual Member States of the European Union (EU) start to be technically obsolete, but their greatest drawback is their diversity and mutual incompatibility with the systems of the other Member States, which is an obstacle when trains enter the territory of a foreign country. This diversity resulted in an idea of creating and implementing a new uniform, markedly more perfect and safer system of train control system equipment within the framework of the European Union. In 1995, the European Commission defined a global strategy for development of the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) with a view to preparing its future implementation on the European Railway Network, and projected the same into the Interoperability Directive and subsequently into the Technical Specifications for Interoperability of the Control-Command and Signalling Subsystem also for the conventional European railway system.
The ERTMS consists of two main areas. The first one is to ensure communication, and the other one is to ensure transport safety and control. The European Train Control System (ETCS) is a European tool which makes it possible to pass the information about the movement authority as well as about the permitted speed on to the driver, and at the same time it is able to check the driver whether these instructions are respected or not. Through the ETCS system, the trackside part passes, on to the on-board part of the system, the information which continually determines and checks the respecting of the maximum permitted speed of the train in question.
Trackside components of the ERTMS system have been introduced in the Czech Republic since 2005 in accordance with the National ERTMS Implementation Plan, namely the already above-mentioned ECTS and GSM-R (Global System for Mobile Communications – Railway) of the application level 2 (Level 2 complying with the basic standard 3 – Baseline 3) by the Railway Infrastructure Administration, state-owned organisation. According to this Implementation Plan, or according to the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2017/6 on the European Rail Traffic Management System European deployment plan, all the core railway corridors of the Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T) in the Czech Republic will be gradually equipped with trackside components of the ERTMS system.
Within the framework of the project implementation, altogether 99 vehicles of ČD, a.s., operating on the TEN-T corridors inside the Czech Republic, will be equipped with ERTMS elements, namely with on-board components of the ETCS system, and these vehicles will become, after the ETCS installation, fully interoperable and suitable also for seamless international cooperation on the TEN-T corridors, or on the CNC system (Core Network Corridors).
Presupposed amount of eligible costs: EUR 24,936,882
Amount of the subsidy provided: 85% of eligible costs
Total maximum amount of the support: EUR 21,196,349.70
Contact person:
Ing. Jiří Dejmek
dejmek@gr.cd.cz