Rens Holslag: High Speed Train Interface

This next five minutes I would like to give you some insight into train driving in Europe. I stand here as the representative of a development team which came with a new European standard for the driver interface of the train. It is not only for high-speed trains as your programme says, but it is for all European trains.

On the middle screen you will see some stills that will hopefully give you insight into what this interface should be. I give you one hint: if you see white colours there is no problem, if you see yellow colours then there is some possible danger, if you see orange colours on the screen there is the possibility that the computer will take over the train driving and if you see red colours then the computer has definitely taken over driving. And it will do so until you are within safe speed limits again and then the driver can take over.

On the slides on the far side of the screen I offer some insight into the project itself. On the first slide, to get it into perspective: there are a lot of projects all over Europe which are connected to this European Traffic Management System, as they call it, and some have to do with the development of new trains, some with the development of new tracks. And what we did in the Netherlands is what you see in the far corner right: the MMI, the Man Machine Interface.

We started in 1991. The first thing one of the Dutch Railway representatives did was an investigation all over Europe into the existing systems of train control. There are some 27 different companies which run trains over Europe and they have 14 different systems. Most of these systems are mechanical and mostly they are incompatible with each other, which means that trains have to stop at borders and there have to be different trains connected to it before the train can continue.

We started this project from the perspective of the train driver, because in the end it will be a machine, but the first thing we are interested in is the task of the driver, so we would like to make a human interface.

And what is train driving essentially? It is taking something from A to B in the safest way, that is the first place, and in the shortest possible way within given information. Given information: basically train driving could be regarded as a very simple process, because if you are on a track you cannot get off this track as you could with a car. You essentially have only two buttons: you can speed it up or you can brake a train and all the rest is funny nonsense.

But you have a lot of information: you have information outside: the environment, there can be things on the track, there can be signs, there can be signals. You have information inside the train, which is the speed, the braking, the warnings, the lights, the sounds. And you have communication with people who control the track. Starting this process we had some requirements, I mean Dutch Railways had hired me as one of the people working on this project. There was the intention to get one European standard. Secondly, there was the intention or there was the belief that most mechanical parts will disappear out of trains and they will in some way change into electronical parts. The maximum speed of trains at this moment goes up to 300 - 350 km/hr., but it will probably go up to 500 km/hr. This means that, if you want to stop a train which drives at some 350, it needs some 8 kilometres to stand still and if there is another train approaching you it also needs 8 kilometres, so you will have to look 16 kilometres inside the landscape. This means you need electronic sight instead of depending upon your own vision.

There will be short distances between trains. They will be moving like cars on the highway, which means you need more intelligent blocking systems. Train drivers will make longer trips. So instead of the situation now, where a train driver stops at Den Bosch and a Belgian train driver takes over, in the future, a Dutch train driver for example could drive from Amsterdam to Vienna and he or she will not know exactly what the route will be. So we have to give route information on this new electronic display.

We developed some new principles for train driving, one of which you see on the far end is a sort of graphical representation, where the speed is a vertical bar and the distance a train needs to stop is the red cone in front of it. Another one is a sort of ideal driver which drives in front of you. If you as a train driver drive too fast, this ideal train driver comes up to you, it signs with its lights and if you are driving too slow then it goes to the horizon. All these things were built into a simulator, a one-to-one working model. This went on tour through Europe. In ten different countries we had ten train drivers driving this and all the information that it gave was processed and evaluated. This led to a sort of integration of the different design principles, where in the end we came with this new interface, which you have just seen.