Rail-ready!

With no less than 3 illus­trat­ed vol­umes, in French and in Eng­lish, this pub­li­ca­tion direct­ed by Wal­ter SCHÖN can right­ly be called “the Bible of rail­road sig­nalling in Europe”. 

In the begin­ning, there were 11 pro­fes­sors from the Rail­road ad urban trans­port sys­tem Master’s degrees (Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, which trains young recruits for the SNCF), Alstom, the RATP, Bom­bardier, etc. 

The pro­fes­sors in fact were all pro­fes­sion­al engi­neers from the ranks of the com­pa­nies named above, Wal­ter SCHON him­self hav­ing spent 10 years with Alstom and Matra. “The Master’s degree pro­vides a gen­er­al cul­tur­al, insight in rail­road trans­port sys­tems, and has a pro­fes­sion­al dis­ser­ta­tion to obtain the diplo­ma”, details Wal­ter SCHON. “Giv­en the excel­lent lev­el and rep­u­ta­tion of the group of lec­tur­ers we have, the back­ground d infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject is exten­sive: indeed, that is how the idea to pro­duce a book-form emerged”.

After 3 years’ work, the total edi­tion will be pre­sent­ed in 3 vol­umes, the first of which came out in March and the 3rd and last is planned for Autumn 2013. The sub­ject mat­ter cov­ers sig­nalling sys­tems, rail­road automats, major rail sys­tems and func­tions, and their appli­ca­tions in France and abroad. The exam­ples are cho­sen from France, the UK and Ger­many which are “the three prin­ci­pal rail cul­tures in Europe.” “Many rail safe­ty sys­tems were installed fol­low­ing acci­dents, but we chose not to show these in the pub­li­ca­tion. Rather than show pho­tographs of the scenes, we placed minia­ture trains in sim­i­lar mock-ups”, stress­es Wal­ter SCHON. “What we want­ed was a book that would be read­er-friend­ly, to skim through at leisure, for pro­fes­sion­als but also for rail­road fans.”

1 500 copies of each vol­ume will be print­ed and the Parisian trans­port con­sor­tium, RATP, has already acquired 200. “The books will become a ref­er­ence text-book, adding vis­i­bil­i­ty to the UTC, which already has recog­nised skills in rail sig­nalling and safe­ty mea­sures.

Le magazine

Novembre 2024 - N°64

L’intelligence artificielle : un outil incontournable

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