European ATP/ATC operation across borders by means of the operational switching system

The railways in Europe anticipate an important increase in traffic and, due to the growing European collaboration, especially in train traffic across the borders. Automatic train protection (ATP) and automatic train control (ATC) form an important part of modern train operation. Because of the long separate history of national railway development, railways improved their ATP/ATC systems based on their existing systems that are not compatible to each other. In this paper, means for safe switching between different ATP/ATC systems at borders within Europe have been studied. As a result it has been shown that transitions can be handled by the operational switching system of the EUROCAB system either automatically with driver information, automatically with driver acknowledgement, or initiated and confirmed by driver actions. In order to guarantee fail-safe stopping of trains in the case of transition errors, corresponding measures have been proposed