Railway crossings degrade significantly faster than plain line track, with lifespans commonly lasting less than 5 years despite their design lives typically being 15 years. This results in Billions of Euros being spent on unplanned corrective maintenance, crossing renewals and delay-minutes, which would not occur if they could be better managed to reach their design lives. XCROSS will develop a suite of integrated disruptive technologies which combine to provide a technological process for the monitoring, inspection, and maintenance intervention of crossing surface profiles. To achieve the objectives, new crossing inspection techniques will be developed using 3D laser scanning technology and computer vision to allow for fast, repeatable and high accuracy crossing measurement. These 3D scans will then be used to create digital twins (DT) of the crossing, embedded with advanced wheel-rail interaction calculation algorithms. Considering these wheel forces and also on-site practical maintenance constraints, the digital twin will use optimisation strategies to calculate the optimal geometry profile achievable via on-site welding and grinding techniques in terms of lifecycle cost. Then, to enable practical implementation of the calculated optimum crossing profile geometries, Augmented Reality (AR) and 3D printing techniques will be developed to provide visualisation guides for on-site welding and grinding. These technologies will allow the maintenance engineers to see their welding and grinding progress ‘live’, and thus be an enabler for a step-change in the quality control of crossing interventions. Lastly, an early warning system will also be developed to act as the initial trigger for the deployment of the 3D scanning, AR and 3D printing. It is vital for detecting the early signs of degradation and thus initiating the deployment of the new maintenance process before the onset of irreparable degradation.

WRIST will develop and demonstrate flexible and cost effective joining processes for rail products, and in particular for advanced bainitic rail steels, which have been developed to answer the increasing demands of increasing speed and growth of railway’s load. This will be delivered by the combined development of the joining processes itself, welding experiments, computational modelling, material and joint characterisation and testing, using laboratory tests and full-scale field testing in industrial or commercial test tracks. The project will offer a step change in the joint performance and reliability providing an extended in-service life for a range of rail materials, therefore resulting in a significant cost reduction in maintenance of the track, also freeing up more capacity for rail traffic. New variants of the aluminothermic and orbital friction welding processes will be developed, which will both reduce the width of the heat affected zone and minimise the loss of mechanical properties in the weld zone. These innovations will enable the use of bainitic rail steels which will deliver an increased reliability, a longer lifetime of the rails and welds combined with a reduction of the maintenance cost. The project addresses the specific call topics by: - Development and application of advanced joining technologies, able to join conventional and bainitic rail steels with a higher quality and reliability, to meet the more stringent infrastructure requirements imposed by increased speed and load, resulting in less maintenance and a longer track lifetime. - Reduction of maintenance cost and life cycle cost of the rail and welds, due to less repair welding associated with a higher weld quality and the longer track lifetime. - Increased availability of the track; less unforeseen maintenance. - Profit for users: less disruptions and a higher safety level. - Use of a more environmental friendly and energy efficient joining techniques.

Two major issues of secondary lines rail transport are need to change the train for many destinations and to be bound to a timetable. Pods can be used to adopt rail transport better to the users demand by higher flexibility and efficiency as well as realising on-demand rail transport. The Project Pods4Rail aims to develop a concept for Pods and Pod-Carriers on Railway in order show the approach. Pod-carriers are serving as a moving infrastructure and the pods are loaded and locked on them for the transport. The main focus in Pods4Rail is the rail pod-carrier, which is presented in detail. Nevertheless, Pod-Carrier for Road and Ropeways are taken into consideration on a conceptual level to ensure the transferability of the concept. Related use cases and business cases are identified and analysed.

The MaDe4Rail project aims to explore non-traditional and emerging maglev-derived systems (MDS) and to evaluate the technical feasibility and effectiveness to introduce MDS in Europe under safety aspects and technical-economic performance. Identification and benchmarking of the different maglev-derived technologies for transportation systems and their state of development, definition of a common architecture and specification of the subsystems and technologies needed for its commercialization are expected in the MaDe4Rail Project. Moreover, a risk analysis and identification of needs for standardization on safety and security in operations of MDS will be performed. Also, the assessment of the technical and economic feasibility to introduce these systems into the common European mobility network will be implemented as well as the development of a European roadmap for the possible future implementation of MDS. Lastly, the design of the concept for an MDS vehicle subsystem and a prototype of a sample vehicle for a European use case are foreseen in this project. The MaDe4Rail project is expected to have significant impacts such as contributing to the development of MDS, promoting more sustainable passenger and freight transport and initiating a path towards the reinforcement of railway as the backbone of a multimodal, sustainable and efficient mobility network by possibly, upgrading the existing railway lines/facilities through the adoption of a maglev-derived technology. Moreover, the project fosters information exchange and growth and diffusion of knowledge. MaDe4Rail brings together a multidisciplinary group of experts from diverse backgrounds with a wide range of competences and expertise that would contribute to the success of the project such as Infrastructure Managers, Transport Authorities, Engineering and Consultancy Companies, Technological Developers and Research Centers and Universities.

Formed of three discrete workstreams, the FINE-2 project will investigate means of enabling Integrated Mobility Management (I2M), saving Energy, and reducing inconvenient and disruptive Noise and Vibration (N&V) within the Rail Sector. As a Cross Cutting Activity of the Shift2Rail Programme, FINE-2 will work alongside multiple existing projects to achieve more impactful results through collaboration and shared learning. The I2M workstream will help to enhance the business case for intermodal freight transportation by tackling many of the issues present today, such as accurate ETA, control of hazardous material, and reduced resource waste. I2M will also look at improving Rail Operations through the new forms of data combination and representation. The Energy workstream will develop tools to help understand the energy saving potential, thus Whole Life Cost benefits, of specific enhancements within the industry. It will also optimise tunnel resistance characteristic methodologies, and seek to enhance energy norms to reflect existing state of the art and future developments. Finally the N&V will develop and enhance existing models and simulation tools from across the S2R programme to better understand the source of external noise, whether the train is at standstill or in motion, to help pinpoint the means of reducing it.