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Bombela, the consortium that operates South Africa's Gautrain, has enlisted Thales to design a new fare collection system for the Johannesburg–Pretoria rail corridor. Thales, which supplied the original contactless ticketing system prior to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, will provide a...

Passengers have been getting their first look inside the spectacular new central atrium at the revamped Birmingham New Street station. New Street fully reopened to passengers on September 20, following a five-year, £750 million redevelopment. As well as a much larger...

Need a new wardrobe, coffee table or office chair? You’ll probably buy it flat-packed from a certain Swedish retailer and spend an entire Sunday afternoon struggling to assemble it with the tiniest of allen keys. But some are breaking this habit and choosing to ‘upcycle’ tired, second hand furniture instead of...

Eight Mobile Maintenance Trains (MMT) will be entering service over the next 12 months, based at locations in the East Midlands, on the East Coast Main Line and across the south-east. The trains are intended to reduce the amount of disruptive access needed for routine engineering work whilst improving workforce...

The redeveloped station at Birmingham New Street will be unveiled on 20th September, a notable landmark in a challenging construction programme that got underway five years ago. It’s a long way from the concrete monolith opened by British Rail in March 1967 when electric services to the capital were introduced...

Prime Minister David Cameron made a surprise appearance to mark the official opening of Hitachi’s new train manufacturing site in Newton Aycliffe. The £82 million facility is Hitachi’s only European train factory and will support the company’s activities both in the UK and on the continent. The Newton Aycliffe site...

The many articles on ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System), in both this magazine and other publications covering the rail industry, have generally reported that the system with its component parts of ETCS (European Train Control system), GSM-R and the ETML (the still to come traffic management level) will yield...

The city of Auckland, home to the world’s largest Polynesian population and known to the Maori as Tamaki Makaurau, is the biggest in New Zealand. Currently about the same size as Birmingham in the UK, it has a population of about 1.4 million occupying an urban area of almost 426...

Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) chief executive Charles Horton talks to Marc Johnson about how the operator is addressing the service challenges posed by Thameslink’s vast infrastructure programme Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) can now rightly call itself the biggest rail franchise in Britain following the absorption of Southern and Gatwick Express...

Network Rail recently commissioned a large-scale project to create a 3D digital model of Liverpool Street Station in London. The model was to be based largely on 3D laser scan data collection in the field by surveying teams, which would then be supplemented and cross-checked against existing asset records. The logistics...