GSM, Transportation, India, Asia-Pacific: Indian Railways will use wireless railway communications technology from Nortel to help improve safety and efficiency on one of the most important and busiest rail arteries serving India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.

The wireless system will be used to connect train conductors, onboard crew, train dispatchers, station personnel and other operations groups. The latter include those responsible for attaching and separating rail cars at station yards.

This Uttar Pradesh signalling and communications contract is the largest of its type awarded by Indian Railways to date as part of the modernisation of its national railway infrastructure. The contract was secured by a regional consortium consisting of Ansaldo Signal, its Asia-Pacific subsidiary Union Switch & Signal, MR Trading and Leighton Asia (Southern) Limited. Nortel was selected by Leighton to provide the GSM-R network. It follows other railway-oriented contracts for Nortel when the company was chosen as sole provider of a GSM-R solution to West Bengal’s Eastern Railway, as provider GSM-R switching centres along passenger lines spanning 20 of China’s 31 provinces, and for the initial phase of Africa’s first GSM-R project, by Algerian Railways operator SNTF.

more info: www.nortelnetworks.com