Romania's Rail Corridor Gets a New Communication Network

Kontron Transportation has been awarded several contracts on the Romanian section of the Orient/East-Med Corridor, announced from Vienna on 1 September in a corporate release tagged as incoming orders. Kontron is the primary provider of the communication network technology, with longstanding partner Hitachi Rail Romania managing broader integration and project execution. The work is planned over 48 months.

Railway communication is one of the more demanding network engineering problems, and the four-year timeline reflects it rather than any lack of urgency. A corridor network runs for hundreds of kilometres through terrain with no convenient power or backhaul, has to keep working while trains continue to run through the construction, and carries traffic classes with entirely different requirements sharing one infrastructure: safety-related signalling that cannot tolerate loss, voice for drivers and dispatchers, telemetry, passenger information and increasingly video. Availability requirements are the sort where redundancy is designed at every layer and the acceptance testing is longer than the installation.

The Orient/East-Med Corridor is one of the European Union's core network corridors, running from central Europe down to the eastern Mediterranean, and the Romanian section is among the parts where modernisation is most consequential. Cross-border corridors magnify the interoperability problem: equipment must work with what sits on either side of the border, under regulations and legacy systems that were not designed together.

The commercial structure is conventional and worth noticing anyway. A rail integrator manages the project and a specialist supplies the communication layer, which is how most infrastructure of this scale is delivered — the integrator carries schedule and interface risk, the specialist carries technology risk. Richard Neussl, managing director at Kontron Transportation, and Mihai Bizau, bid and projects director at Hitachi Rail Romania, are quoted.

Kontron says the win confirms its position in Romania's railway communications market and extends its presence across central and eastern Europe. The company employs around 6,500 people in more than 20 countries and is listed on the German Stock Exchange's SDAX and TecDAX indices.