European Railway Traffic Management System

Overview

To bear with the high cost of the different signaling and communication systems, the European Commission started a project back in the early 1990s to analyze the problems provoked by the operation of the different train control-command systems. Two different groups of experts worked out basic strategies on how these problems could be solved. One working group looked at the definition of a new communication system and the other one analyzed the definition of a new signaling standard. The result of their work was the definition of GSM for Railways (GSM-R) as the new digital radio system for railway internal voice and data communication, and the European Train Control System (ETCS) as the new control-command system.