Manufacturer capacity is seen as one of the potential bottlenecks when some 13,000 locomotives and multiple units in Germany have to be retrofitted for ETCS in the coming years. Retrofitting is necessary because more and more railway lines can only be used with the new, Europe-wide standardised technology.
Two DB Cargo locomotives equipped with the GUARDIA Baseline 3.4.0 ETCS automatic train control system are now back on the rails following their retrofit. This represents the first DB 185.2 locomotives to be retrofitted with Stadler's ETCS. The pilot project by Stadler, DB and AngelStar therefore required particularly complex work before the first locomotive was approved as "First of Class". Official approval for the second locomotive, which was retrofitted in the same way, was much easier: as it was considered structurally identical, it was granted "conformity to type" status. Any future conversions carried out in this way can now be based on this model.
Up to now, Stadler was mainly used to retrofitting its own vehicles. Stadler received its first retrofit order for GUARDIA in 2020 from the Dutch rail operator Arriva. Some of its 34 FLIRT vehicles are also used for cross-border services in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
The GUARDIA ETCS automatic train control system from AngelStar, a joint venture between Stadler and the MERMEC Group, has already been approved in several European countries and is in operation in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Switzerland and the Netherlands. GUARDIA consists of both hardware and software components installed on trains. The system allows the driver to visualise the position of the train, its speed and other data. All this data is also transmitted to a control centre. At the same time, data such as track warrants can be collected.
