TSC, part of the Škoda Group, has announced the release of TBL1+, the first of its new national Class B Automatic Train Protection solutions for vehicles on the Belgian National Rail network. The solution was designed with Lineas and is based on TSC's Universal Digital Rail Platform, iEVC-RailOS. The TSC team is also getting its ETCS solution certified. It will be available in 2025.
“It marks the beginning of the series retrofit cycle for the Lineas HLD77 fleet that will see these locomotives installed, commissioned, and returned to work with TBL1+. It will be done after ERA/DVIS authorization. As the platform already incorporates BTM and Odometry functions, the fleet will be ready for a software-only upgrade to ETCS in 2025-2026. The certification of our ETCS solution should be ready during next year,” said Alexander Betis, Managing Director of The Signalling Company.
iEVC-RailOS is the first to meet the Safety Integrity Level 4 (SIL4) standard for critical rail applications using standard off-the-shelf computing hardware (iEVC) running RailOS, TSC's real-time operating system.
“The release of TBL1+ marks the first step of the iEVC-RailOS vision shared and seeded by Lineas’ early investment in TSC. Now we can proceed with our retrofit program in the knowledge that we have a futureproof digital rail platform on board the HLD77 fleet; one that can be upgraded to support the ETCS Baseline 3 to 4 evolution and other applications during the fleet’s operational lifetime,” explained Kurt Coffyn, COO at Lineas.
