Safety commission on railway: Plan to invest CZK 90 billion to make Czech railways safer is complete9/12/2020|Press releasesOn its today’s meeting, the working commission to improve safety of the railways traffic adopted a plan to make the Czech railways safer even in the last two categories, i.e. on regional routes. We finally know, when and how will Správa železnic (National railway infrastructure manager) coordinate the installation of additional features on the Czech railways (e.g. ETCS). The safety commission accomplished its target that was assigned by the minister of transport Karel Havlíček. Representatives of carriers, investors, trade unions or academia agreed on a time schedule to implement the European Time Control System (ETCS) on regional railways in category C (ca. 4,500 km) between 2021 and 2039. These can be basically divided into two groups. The first group represents regional tracks with heavy traffic and high-speed tracks that will be equipped with a full ETCS railways part (L1 or L2). The second group consists of tracks with minimum traffic, low-speed tracks, or tracks with small development perspective, which will be equipped with simpler type of ETCS features (according to the adopted D3 Concept). “The investment in these two categories will be CZK 44 billion. The total costs to secure all tracks by 2040 will amount to CZK 90 billion”, said minister of transport Karel Havlíček. After today’s meeting, a complete map of Czech railways is available. This map shows the exact timing to implement ETCS on each track. The commission also adopted a time schedule to equip railways with a communication system GSM-R (2021–2040), which is an integral part of a technological development of our railways.