Siemens Mobility has been awarded a €231m contract to implement an electrical systems and signalling interlocking enhancement package for Taiwan Railways Administration. This includes replacing relay interlockings with Trackguard Westrace Mk II electronic interlockings at 68 stations to cover 450 km of the 1 110 km TRA network.

The design process will include the use of building information management techniques, with a digital model of the network used to record and manage relevant data. There will also be a prototype interlocking based on the Distributed Smart Safe System, which enables the use of commercial-off-the-shelf server hardware and offers geographical redundancy and ‘limitless’ scalability.

Siemens Mobility will provide 10 years of maintenance, using its OMNES predictive maintenance platform which unifies various tools as a single system.

There are options which would expand the scope of the project to a further 10 stations.

‘Siemens Mobility is delighted to have been selected to upgrade a significant portion of the rail network’, said Andre Rodenbeck, CEO of Rail Infrastructure, on June 2. ‘Our state-of-the-art signalling and interlocking technology will augment operations throughout the network by increasing service reliability and availability, which will enhance the passenger experience.’