KAZAKHSTAN Railways (KTZ) and Uzbekistan Railways (UTY) have signed a cooperative agreement to jointly purchase 5000 tonnes of rails by the end of this year from ARBZ, Kazakhstan, as well as a long-term contract with the supplier to procure 13,500 tonnes of high-quality rail annually for high-speed lines up to 2020.

THE Protran Technology unit of Harsco Rail, United States, has won orders from Washington Area Transit Authority (WMATA) and Sacramento Regional Transit District for track worker protection systems to be supplied before the end of the year.

THE Canadian government has appointed a negotiator and says it is willing to explore interim funding options or the potential sale of the Hudson Bay Railway to Churchill in order to reopen the line as soon as possible following major flood damage.

CONTRACTORS working on London’s Crossrail project have completed track installation work, marking another key milestone in the £14.8bn project ahead of the opening of the Elizabeth Line in December 2018.

IRJ at the 11th International Heavy Haul Association Conference, Cape Town: AN autonomous track inspection vehicle developed by South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Transnet is on display at this week's International Heavy Haul Association Conference in Cape Town.

LIMA Metro has awarded a €2.1m two-year contract to a consortium of Catalunya Railways (FGC) and Spanish consultant engineering company Ardanuy to supervise infrastructure and rolling stock maintenance on Line 1.

GERMANY’s infrastructure manager DB Network has signed a three-year framework ultrasonic rail inspection agreement with Gleistechnik Süd, a subsidiary of Vossloh. There is an an option to extend the agreement for one year.

Vossloh is optimising its rail fastening systems by developing new tension clamps and other fastening components. This is being achieved thanks to a new co-simulation of FEM and MBS models, as Dr-Ing Duo Liu and Dr-Ing Sven Kretzschmar, engineers with Vossloh Fastening Systems’ research and development department, explain.

Railways are using optical fibre sensing networks to switch from scheduled to condition-based and predictive maintenance, explains Shun-Yee Liu, Hwa-Yaw Tam, and Kang-Kuen Lee from Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s electrical engineering department, and Kei-Chun Cheng from Volant Railway Technologies, Hong Kong.

NETWORK Rail (NR) has announced a series of “sweeping reforms,” which will enable the private sector to play a more active role in delivering major infrastructure projects.