About Giorgio Travaini

Giorgio is Executive Director of the Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking, the European partnership driving rail research and innovation. He has played a key role in leading Europe’s rail research and innovation programmes, being responsible for the €1.2 billion Europe’s Rail R&I Programme since 2021 and supervising the €920 million Shift2Rail R&I Programme since 2015. Before joining Europe’s Rail, he was Senior Corporate Advisor at UNIFE, advising on strategic topics and contributing to the preparation of Shift2Rail. Since 2007, he has supervised several R&I projects, teams and technical committees and served as Secretary of ERRAC. He holds an Engineering Degree from the Polytechnic University of Turin and a Master’s Degree in Public Affairs from London South Bank University.

About Europe’s Rail

Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking is a European public-private partnership established in 2021 under the Horizon Europe programme, succeeding Shift2Rail JU. It brings together the European Commission and the rail sector to drive research, innovation, and digitalisation, focusing on removing interoperability barriers and accelerating the deployment of innovations to create a high-capacity, sustainable, and integrated European railway network.

https://rail-research.europa.eu/

Key Take Aways:

• Europe’s Rail is a €1.2 billion public–private partnership dedicated to accelerating rail research and innovation and supporting the transformation of the European railway system. Together with its predecessor, the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking (S2R), it has reshaped the European rail R&I landscape, contributing to the development of key technologies and greater system harmonisation.

• The Shift2Rail programme delivered over 700 prototype tests and around 70 innovative solutions, showing that innovation is not the main bottleneck.

• The main challenge is now deployment: bridging the gap between successful demonstrations and large-scale uptake across Europe's fragmented rail network.

• Rail remains central to Europe's sustainability and competitiveness priorities, accounting for only 0.4% of transport greenhouse gas emissions while enabling decarbonisation, resilience, digitalisation and cybersecurity

• Digital Automatic Coupling (DAC) is progressing through pioneer trains today, with wider commercial deployment expected from the 2030s.

• Rail automation is already becoming a reality, with Grade 4 autonomous operation demonstrated in operational conditions on an open railway line in Prague, Czech Republic.

• FRMCS will replace GSM-R, providing the digital backbone needed for future automation and high-capacity rail operations.

• Faster and more harmonised authorisation and standardisation processes are essential to reduce costs and accelerate innovation deployment across Europe.

• The proposed next programme would more than double R&I funding to around €3 billion, complemented by €15 billion for pre-deployment and market rollout.

• The vision for 2050 is a highly automated, more integrated European railway system, delivering higher capacity, more services and global technology leadership.

Sebastian Sperker

www.railup.club

sebastian@railup.club

About Sam Bemment

Dr Sam Bemment is Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Universal Signalling. With more than 18 years of experience in engineering, operations, consulting, and railway innovation, Sam brings a deep understanding of both the technical and commercial challenges of rail.

He holds a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and a PhD in Railway Systems Engineering, is a Chartered Engineer, and has worked across the client-supplier interface with operators, infrastructure owners, universities, SMEs, and major rail organisations. At Universal Signalling, he focuses on turning client pain points into faster, more affordable solutions.

About Universal Signalling

Universal Signalling is a UK-based railtech company founded in 2022 with the goal of making digital railway signalling products faster to fit, simpler, and more affordable. Its core philosophy is “Signalling in Days, Not Decades”, with the stated goal of offering clients benefits now, not in a decade’s time.

The company develops low-cost, rapid-deployment technologies, initially for regional, rural, and lower-density railways. Its U-Cross product uses trackside beacons and onboard reader units to provide more accurate train location information, helping improve safety and operational efficiency at user-worked crossings and on lines where traditional signalling upgrades are difficult to justify.

https://www.universalsignalling.com/

Key Takeaways

• ETCS is a the European signalling interoperability standard. It was originally specified in the mid 1990s, and due to complexity/cost is often difficult to justify on lower-density regional and secondary lines.
• Regional railways are essential for the wider network, often providing the first and last mile for freight customers and basic mobility for rural passengers.
• Many rural lines operate under tight budgets, and large signalling upgrade programmes can take longer than a typical 4–5 year political or funding cycle.
• In signalling projects, the biggest cost is usually not the equipment. Sam explains that in UK signalling projects, around 83% of project cost can be labour and project delivery, while only around 17% is equipment.
• A single Eurobalise may cost around £2,000–3,000 as hardware, but once design, installation, testing, and verification labour are included, the installed cost can rise to around £25,000.
• Universal Signalling’s beacons cost around £20–30 per unit including installation, and test labour, roughly 1000 times cheaper than a Eurobalise.
• Instead of installing one expensive balise every kilometre, Universal Signalling can deploy many low-cost beacons, for example every 20 metres. This gives radically better train positioning and enables fault tolerance.
• The company’s U-Cross trial in Wales covered around 18 kilometres, or 11 miles, of track and was installed in just 2.5 overnight shifts, without any prior design work. This will only get faster as the team get more experience.
• U-Cross helps at user-worked crossings, where crossing users may currently have to wait up to 40–45 minutes because signallers do not know exactly where the train is within long rural block sections.
• Universal Signalling’s long-term vision is “Signalling in Days, Not Decades”, reducing deployment times from years to days or weeks and making digital signalling viable for regional railways in the UK, Europe, and potentially a large share of the global rail network.

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Sebastian Sperker

sebastian@railup.club

www.railup.club

About Oliver von Sperber

Oliver is an entrepreneur, technology expert, and rail innovator who brings experience from investment banking and sensor technology to the railway sector. As the founder of AXO, he focuses on making rail infrastructure more resilient through smart, data-driven predictive maintenance.

With a background in forestry, he takes a long-term view of infrastructure—seeing railways as complex systems and vital public goods that require sustainable, generational thinking.

About AXO

AXO enhances the stability of rail networks by providing specialized sensor systems for rail switches. As critical infrastructure nodes, switches are essential for capacity and safe operations, yet remain maintenance-intensive and prone to failure.

With around 20% of infrastructure-related train delays caused by switch failures, AXO focuses on practical solutions to prevent disruptions. By detecting anomalies early, its technology enables infrastructure managers to take preventive action before operations are affected. AXO’s mission is to strengthen the long-term reliability and resilience of railways as a vital public good.

https://axotrack.de/

My Key Takeaways

• A single failed railway switch can disrupt an entire journey — that’s why people avoid tight connections.
• Railways and forests have more in common than you think: both are complex systems managed over decades.
• There are ~60,000 switches in Germany alone — each one a potential failure point.
• Just one local defect can trigger system-wide delays, showing how fragile rail networks are.
• In rail, every minute of delay costs ~€100 — small issues quickly become expensive.
• AXO sensors measure extreme forces up to 500 G, far beyond lab expectations.
• Early field tests completely destroyed the hardware, revealing real-world conditions.
• Instead of “AI-first,” AXO focused on understanding physics and data first.
• The mission is to digitize the intuition of experienced technicians before it disappears.
• The opportunity is global: high-speed, heavy haul, and metro systems all face the same challenge.

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Sebastian Sperker

sebastian@railup.club

https://www.railup.club/