BRUSSELS transport authority Stib has awarded Alcatel-Lucent a contract to supply a fibre-optic broadband communications network as part of the preparations for the automation of the city's metro system.

THE mayor of Chicago Mr Rahm Emanuel and Illinois governor Mr Pat Quinn announced on December 5 that Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) will invest $US 492 in the modernisation of the Blue Line O'Hare Branch, which links the city's main international airport with the city centre.

GERMAN Rail's (DB) long-distance passenger division, DB Fernverkehr, has issued a call for tenders to fit European Train Control System (ETCS) to its ICE1 fleet of high-speed trains.

CHINA's latest metro which is due to open in Zhengzhou on December 26 will be the first to adopt 4G LTE for its telecommunications.

THE International Union of Railways (UIC) and Britain's Railway Safety & Standards Board (RSSB) signed a memorandum of cooperation at the World Congress on Railway Research (WCRR) in Sydney on November 28 to share railway research knowledge through RSSB's Spark website. 

HUNGARY's state holding company, NISZ, has awarded a €46m contract to a consortium of Kapsch CarrierCom and MVM Ovit, a Hungarian transmission network specialist, to install GSM-R on a 900km section of the rail network.

SARDINIAN Regional Transport (Arst) has awarded a €33m contract to a consortium of Alstom and Italian civil works contractor Gemmo to resignal two lines totalling 90km with 20 stations on the Italian island of Sardinia.

A consortium of CAF and Thales has won a $US 451.86m contract from Santiago metro to supply and maintain trains and install communications-based train control (CBTC) on two metro lines under construction in the Chilean capital.

ÖBB Infrastructure has awarded a three-month proof of concept contract to OptaSense, Britain, to trial its Distributed Acoustic Sensing system in the Vienna area.

NOMAD Digital has established a joint venture with EMEF, the maintenance subsidiary of Portuguese Trains (CP) to market onboard condition-based monitoring (CBM) technologies for the rail sector.