Railroad system to save $2 bln

ANKARA - Anatolia News Agency

This file photo shows the fast train line between Ankara and the central Anatolian province of Konya. Turkey plans to use a domestically developed signalization system on all the railway lines of the country.

Turkey has developed a domestically designed railway signalization system, which is estimated will generate around 2 billion Turkish Liras in savings.

Turkish State Railways (TCDD), the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBİTAK) and Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ) have jointly developed a national railway signalization system that cost 4.6 million liras.

“We have developed the National Railway Signalization Project in line with the goal of developing the domestic railway industry, which was identified in 2009 at the 10th Transportation Council. We have put the project into practice and will extend it,” Transportation Minister Binali Yıldırım told Anatolia news agency yesterday.

The system has been in use at Mithatpaşa Railway Station in the northwestern province of Adapazarı for six months now. The use of the system is to be extended to the 338-kilometer Afyon-Denizli-Isparta railway line with 21 stations in the Aegean region. Some 65 million liras will be spent to activate the system on this line. But the figure would hit 165 million if it were contracted out to a foreign company, officials said. The government plans to install the system in 6,100 kilometers of railway lines currently without a signalization system. This will create 2 billion liras in savings, according to estimates.

System to be exported

The government aims to export the system initially to Middle Eastern and Turkic countries, then to the whole world. Turkey has a signalization system in place on one-third, or nearly 4,000 kilometers, of the total railway line of 12,000 kilometers, Yıldırım said. The whole signalization system is comprised of various systems developed by solely foreign companies, he added.

Noting that this situation set an obstacle against a local sub-industry to develop for signalization systems, Yıldırım said, “We aim to remove external dependency in the railway signalization system with the [realization of] the National Railway Signalization Project, and bring low cost solutions to similar problems in this field.”