Unbelievable and yet true are what is revealed by the Justice investigation into the Tempe accident. As documentonews.gr reveals, in 2022 and while all trains worldwide have a modern geo-location system via satellite (GPS) in Greece they were using Vodafone’s geo-location service which has been built for road network and cars and they use private companies in order to know where the vehicles are that they use. Yes, you read it right.. It is another proof of the mess that prevailed on the trains and the lack of modern electronic safety measures and also geolocation, such as GPS.
In fact, as can be seen from her “fire” document Hellenic Train to the special appellate investigator Sotiri Bakaimi which documentonews.gr reveals, the specific system records “approximately” where the trains are, as the service does not have a signal at all points of the train route and especially in… tunnels. And how can it be, since this particular system has been built for cars, motorbikes and the road network and here they put it on trains because the GPS was out of order. Good thing they didn’t put in a tracking system that ships use at sea.
Failure of the OSE to operate the GPS
The document of Hellenic Train was sent a few days ago to the special appellate investigator Sotiris Bakaimis and contained data from the “geolocation system record” kept by the company for the two fatal trains in the accident: The commercial and the passenger.
As reported by Hellenic Train, since its late 2017 and especially the 2018“due to the inability of the OSE to operate an integrated system for locating the trains moving on the line due to years of looting of the track circuits that recorded the position of the trains, it decided to install, mainly for the purpose of informing passengers about the running times of the routes, satellite positioning system (GPS) on rolling stock is required’.
They put in a system for road network and cars
For this reason they turned to the mobile phone company Vodafone in order to use the “IoT Fleet Control” program. This is a service provided by the company “to detect the movement of vehicles on the road network” but not for trains.
The “IoT Fleet Control” service is used by large companies in the pharmaceutical, tourism, delivery services, ice cream factories, etc. the location of your vehicles and at what stage your pickups or deliveries are” as well as “the routes they follow so that you can change them to more ‘smart’ ones if necessary, saving delivery time and fuel economy”.
In fact, a service contract was signed between Vodafone and Hellenic Train in August 2022. It was piloted initially on 20 “rolling stock units” and then a total of 139 geolocation devices were installed. The cost for each system installed was €16.26 per month, with 10MB free, while the total cost for all 139 devices installed was €2,260 per month.
It doesn’t get a signal everywhere and they don’t get recorded
Finally after “many attempts by Vodafone technicians”, the system worked. Of course, a geolocation system that is for cars and the road network and not for trains could work. It is typical that, as Hellenic Train reports, the system in question works “roughly” as regards the position of each train, “due to the discontinuous signal flow”.
This results in “short-term stops not being recorded, but the train appearing as moving, while it is not possible to record any movement inside tunnels or in areas with peculiar relief”.
In this case as pointed out, the stop made by the passenger train at the stations Thebes, Meadow, Tithorea and Retail branchhas not been recorded, “due to their short duration”.
See her paper Hellenic Train and the brochure with her offer Vodafone
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