Resumen
This article is devoted to a discussion of digital railway projects in Europe. EU rules require the European railway system to work as a single system of systems. Commercial drivers in the industry include round-the-clock operation, high availability, low cost, security, increased throughput, simplified disaster recovery, low carbon emissions, and customer satisfaction. There are about 30 national railway signaling systems in the EU, which may cause technical or operational problems at borders. To overcome this drawback, the EU decided to develop, adopt and implement a single standard for command, control, signaling and communication, ERTMS, establishing a compatible railway structure throughout the EU. Installed both on the track system and on board, it consists of the European Train Management System (ETCS), ensuring that the train does not exceed the safe speed and distance from other trains, and the global mobile communications system on railways (GSM-R), representing the radio standard for rail traffic. With the introduction of ERTMS, a lot is changing: the speed of trains and their density on the railway network increase. All this determines the very essential requirements, both to the track infrastructure and to the rolling stock.