This paper was published in IRSE NEWS October 2017.
Railway education at TU Braunschweig is provided by two institutes that belong to the Faculty of Architecture, Civil Engineering, and Environmental Sciences. One of them, the Institute of Railway Systems Engineering and Traffic Safety (IfEV), which is headed by Professor Jörn Pachl, works mainly in the areas of railway operation and signalling but also covers track alignment. While the term ‘Traffic Safety’ in the institute’s name sounds rather generic, the IfEV is today a pure railway institute.
The teaching program consists of modules covering different aspects of railway operation and control, e.g., scheduling, operational capacity, operating rules, signalling principles, and all of these aspects are connected to each other in a very complex way in a real railway. Here, traditional classroom lectures have their limits. A solution that has been successfully used for decades is to run training sessions in railway operations laboratories. In such a laboratory, a railway network is represented by a model railway layout, controlled by real user interfaces.
Since such a layout does not exist at TU Braunschweig, laboratories at other universities are used on a regular basis. To better meet the increasing demand for laboratory sessions, the idea was formed to establish a Virtual Railway Operations Laboratory (V-EBL) at TU Braunschweig. Train movements are simulated by a computer in a virtual network controlled by user interfaces of the same type used on real railways.
This article describes the characteristics and use of the Virtual Railway Operations Laboratory, for controlling train movements, for train driving simulation, and for research work.