The Needs Tailored Interoperable Railway project (NeTIRail-INFRA) focuses on infrastructure challenges affecting the large number of people and the large geographical proportion of Europe (especially recent accession countries) that are served by conventional rail lines. These lines have huge potential for a step change in productivity which must be addressed to ensure economic viability. The work will address growing demand for already busy services, and future growth of under utilised lines, with technical solutions for track, power supply and support of new smart services. Technical developments in NeTIRail-INFRA will focus on modular infrastructure, i.e. standard designs with multiple application in different locations, thereby reducing planning cycles, enabling a lean design process for new installation and retro-fit. Accompanying economic and social impact research is packaged as decision support tools to implement the findings in management of the rail network. Holistic treatment of the economy of operation will be developed, including societal impacts of rail investment decisions, to increase attractiveness of rail for all passenger categories. This focus differentiates NeTIRail-INFRA from purely technical development projects and will ensure its outputs have a real market, and achieve genuine impact. The project targets the Shift2Rail priorities of enhancing capacity, increasing the reliability and quality of services, and significantly reducing life cycle costs, and supports the Transport White Paper ‘Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area’ target that by 2050 the majority of medium-distance passenger transport should be by rail. The project targets reliability/availability up ~20%, capacity utilisation of 70-90%, and recurrent costs down 25-45%. Alongside its impact on transport, the skills developed in the project will allow European businesses and researchers to export their knowledge to wider markets, supporting EU competitiveness and growth.

The rail sector has recently seen only limited changes in running gear.The rail sector has recently seen only limited changes in running gear. A reason is that innovations have the tendency to increase the first cost of the running gear while they reduce the LCC by reduce maintenance costs. The long-term cost reduction, however, is not easy to quantify. This dilemma will be addressed in WP1 where an updated Universal Cost Model based on the one from the Roll2Rail project will be developed that makes it possible to judge the economic impact of the innovation suggested for an operator using the vehicle. How can the costs for buying, operating and maintaining the vehicle be influenced? Lower bogie weight would reduce wheel-rail forces and allow for higher payload. In WP2, the project is going to suggest ideas that are based both on the use of new materials and new manufacturing methods. Simulation techniques will be explored to allow optimisation of designs. It will be investigated whether required properties of the running gear such as stiffness and damping could be distributed through the structure rather than requiring specific components. In parallel, active control strategies will be investigated to improve the level of ride comfort or reduce wheel and rail damage. The wheelset is another extremely important and safety-critical component in a rail vehicle. Since it represents a so-called “unsuspended mass” there is a desire to minimize the wheelset weight. The main objective of WP3 is a feasibility study on the use of composite materials for the construction of railway wheelsets. Technology concepts for a lightweight wheelset will be defined. Main focus areas are material selection, durability, manufacturing process and joining methods. The output of this project will be important input for the parallel member project in IP1 both regarding the Cost Model and the technical innovations. There will also be a contribution to the overall S2R KPI’s and partly IP3.