The recent safety incidents on the French railway network (the TGV derailment at Marseilles St Charles) underline the fact that the condition of rail infrastructure is of major concern in transportation and users’ safety. The failure of key components has been identified as the major cause. These are due to internal defects localized in the rail foot (corrosion, damages) as confirmed by destructive analyses performed at SNCF Réseau labs (up to 20% of the rail breaks observed in 2020 are due to rail foot). Non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of railway tracks is a key link of network maintenance. Inspections with conventional devices operating from the top of rail have proved their ability to control the rail head condition with accuracy. These devices fail to keep the same reliability for the lower parts of the rail, i.e. the web and foot regions, where internal deep defects possibly leading to severe damage (rail breakage), still remain non-detectable. The ULTRATRAIL objectives are to overcome the limitations of the conventional practice by proposing a feasibility analysis based on novel imaging tools relying on ultrasonic wave propagation prone to answer the major issue of both detection and location, including cross-section localization of defects, in particular deep buried defects, under only one-sided access illumination/observation conditions along the rail running surface. More specifically, the aims of the proposal are to: -expand rail ultrasonic NDE techniques beyond traditional travel-time based methods by investigating bulk and/or guided wave topological imaging, facilitated by lab-scale experiments and a digital twin, -design and construct experimental Piezoelectric and EMAT transducer devices for the practical implementation of the proposed methodology, -contribute to the validation of these methodologies, devices, digital twin on realistic dedicated rail specimens at scale 1. ULTRATRAIL is organized into 4 following packages: (1) Industrial specifications & TRL5 in-situ demonstrator, (2) Experimental demonstrator for 2D contact Topological Imaging, (3) EMATS development toward non-contact imaging, (4) Digital twins for ultrasonic 3D imaging of rails.

The FUSAR project aims to improve the safety and efficiency of railway infrastructures by developing an advanced warning system based on the fusion of multi-scale and multi-source data. This innovative approach will enable proactive risk management, minimising service interruptions and environmental impacts, while reducing maintenance costs. The project combines IoT, LiDAR, GNSS, InSar and satellite imagery to effectively detect faults and risk areas. It also addresses challenges related to geo-referencing, data interoperability and automatic fault recognition. Using hybrid Deep Learning approaches, the project aims to establish a framework for data fusion at the decision-making level. The introduction of alert thresholds will help SNCF Réseau to anticipate faults and contribute to maintaining the availability of facilities.

The climate change makes the near-surface geohazards risk mitigation a priority, and there is a need for the monitoring of earth material beneath cities using new sensing strategies. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is a recent breakthrough in opto-electronics, which allows recording seismic vibrations on fiber optic (FO). This, in turn, may be used for near-surface geohazards assessment. The application of this technology on existing telelecom FO already deployed in cities for monitoring purposes is appealing, but remains challenging. This project aims to evaluate how the existing telecom FO can be used to monitor the near-surface beneath transportation facilities. For that purpose, an integrated study combining telecom FO DAS measurements in a railway context, machine learning, geophysical processing and physical modeling is proposed. The outcome of this research will allow developing safe and sustainable smart cities from the leveraging of existing communication infrastructure.

The S5LECT – SatCom and 5G Link, Edge and CybersecuriTy – project, coordinated by SNCF and developed by Railenium, GTS France (THALES), Radiolabs and CEIT, will experiment a solution for seamless handover between 5G terrestrial network, Satellite link and GSM-R communication system. In the automotive and rail domains, vehicles are entering the era of full automation thanks to wireless sensors and communication systems shifting control functions from the human driver to computers. Railways need to increase functionalities of the existing signalling and automation systems and related design and validation processes therefore providing a more competitive, flexible, real-time, intelligent traffic management and decision support system. Those technological innovation will help Railway to answer his ambition to increase rail traffic with the future ATO and FRMCS. The consortium will study the hybridization of terrestrial and satellite communications networks for railway critical applications. The project will last 30 months and is tailored to define and develop an innovative solution for seamless handover between terrestrial and satellite communication networks, to assess cyber-security risks and propose solutions, to propose innovative architecture for Edge computing and finally to provide a proof of concept of all the bricks developed in the project thanks to an original laboratory testing platform. The S5LECT project will directly contribute to the development of solutions for the use of GOVSATCOM satellite communications in the railway domain. It will also contribute to the development and testing activities to deliver more reliable and robust wireless communication prototypes. This should help to enhance the testing activities and minimize time and efforts to deliver the next generation of adaptable wireless communications for all railway segments.

The development of safe and secure applications such as remote driving, remote diagnostics, platooning of trains and autonomous vehicles in railway context has led to an unprecedented need for reliable radio links. The Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) is designed at European level to answer these needs. It will be IP based, multi-bearer and resilient to technology evolution and interference. It will be the system that offers the railway industry a full migration towards 5G as GSM-R will become obsolete in 2030. Its deployment is crucial and urgent to contribute to the modal shift (from road and air) towards rail via the generalization of intelligent and interconnected transport systems. 5G features such as Massive MIMO, beamforming, and multicarrier wave forms, as well as the FRMCS multi-bearer capability will require drastic modifications of the radio deployment methodologies as compared to the ones used for GSM-R. In addition, on-track systematic system validations should be reduced to a minimum for cost and time efficiency but also due to the urgency to replace GSM-R system. This approach called “zero-on-site testing” is based on (i) realistic railway radio channel characterization and modelling, (ii) system-level evaluation based on these models. The 5G REMORA project will bring a crucial brick for “zero-on-site testing” of FRMCS via the elaboration of new reliable digital testing solutions. In this context, the 5G REMORA project is set up to develop realistic 5G railway radio channel models from on-site sounder measurements collected in various scenarios, stochastic models and enhanced ray tracing. Three different operational MIMO channel sounding systems with specific properties in terms of mobility and autonomy will be used to address the different scenarios of interest (high-speed, dense urban, tunnel, etc). SNCF will make the testing trains and other required facilities available for the several measurement campaigns. This will enable accurate FRMCS system evaluation to anticipate and facilitate its wide deployment in railway frequency bands (900 - 1900 MHz) that are not covered in other 5G related projects. In addition, the 5G REMORA project will develop optimized radio scheduling techniques for the railway applications to support discussions for the evolution of the ETSI TC-RT standard.