Noise & Vibrations supplement 2013

• Reducing vibrations near railway lines – ways for finding effective measures
  Wolfgang Behr, RIVAS Coordinator, UIC and Isabelle De Keyzer, Dissemination of EU Co-Funded R&D Projects, UIC
  In 2009, a broad political majority decided to fund a total replacement of the entire signalling system on the Danish national network with ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System) and all the signalling on the Copenhagen S-bane with a CBTC system (Communication Based Train Control). So far, progress is on time and on budget and with this, Denmark will be the first country to carry out a nationwide implementation of ERTMS level 2 baseline 3 – the newest European standard…
• Industry cooperation needed for a less noisy railway
  Siv Leth, Chairwoman, UNIFE Noise Mirror Group and Nicolas Furio, Coordinator, UNIFE Noise Mirror Group
  The UNIFE Noise Mirror Group (MG) brings together experts from European rolling stock manufacturers and aims to steer UNIFE work on standardisation, regulation and research of railway noise. The UNIFE Noise MG is involved in the activities of the Noise Technical Specification for Interoperability (TSI) revision managed by the European Railway Agency (ERA) and is driving UNIFE research activities for noise issues…
• Speech intelligibility in trains
  Jesús Otero Yugat, Senior Test Engineer, CETEST and Igor Alonso Portillo, Director – Strategy and Business Development, CETEST
  Speech intelligibility between passengers and the intelligibility of acoustical messages are an important matter concerning the acoustic comfort inside a train. Passengers of high-speed vehicles, conventional trains and tramways might be exposed to relatively high sound levels due to auxiliary equipment in operation such as the HVAC system as well as general rolling noise. In this situation, speech intelligibility can be decreased by the transmission path between the talker and the listener, or even between the communication and Public Address (PA) systems of the train and the passengers. In recent years, CETEST has evaluated the speech intelligibility inside railway vehicles by means of on-track dynamic tests. Customers of this acoustic testing not only include vehicle manufacturers and train operators, but also infrastructure managers if we think of the acoustic characterisation of stations…