Movares is the leading railway consultancy and engineering firm in The Netherlands. Movares has taken part in all Dutch ERTMS projects: the High Speed Line between Amsterdam airport and Belgium, the 160 km long dedicated freight line from the port of Rotterdam to Germany, the line section between Amsterdam and Utrecht, and the so called Hanzelijn between Lelystad and Zwolle. Movares currently provides safety management services to Banedanmark (the Danish Rail Infrastructure Manager) in their ERTMS national implementation programme.

Recently, Movares has conducted a number three projects in the ERTMS Pilot on the Amsterdam-Utrecht dual signaling line, with a total budget of more than € 0,5 million.

The first project involved procedures regarding temporary speed restrictions, procedures for maintaining the infrastructure and procedures for dealing with slippery track. The objectives were:

  • to monitor how often personnel adhered to the prescribed procedures or not
  • whether personnel was familiar with the associated processes
  • whether safety issues would arise, should personnel not follow the existing procedures.

The second project aimed to collect all performance requirements, compare them to the actual performance data and determine whether the ERTMS system (infrastructure, GSM-R and on-board) performance met the requirements.

The third project involved the development of a validated simulation tool for railway capacity studies under ERTMS. Movares enhanced its existing simulation tool Hortus. The Hortus system has now been validated by ProRail, which enables Movares to perform capacity analyses for railway networks, both under ERTMS and under the Dutch legacy ATP system. Simulating a dual signaling railway network is also possible.