A new railway line for Intercity Express (ICE) trains is now being built in Germany between Nuremberg and Berlin. It is known as the German Unity Transport Project 8 (VDE 8) and totals 515 km.

For this new line, COMLAB is supplying the digital system components of the network required for German police, fire and other officials (BOS). This involves providing a reliable and redundant communications distribution system based on fibre-optics that meets all requirements of public safety officials and the German Railway. The system components must also meet requirements of the different German states and be certified by the German Federal Railway Office (EBA). The COMLAB system has been chosen because of the company’s many years’ experience in tunnel communication systems involving different components and in the development of complete systems that enjoy an excellent reputation worldwide.

As the supplier of these high-performance systems, COMLAB’s highest priority is to ensure faultless interaction of different components GSM-R, TETRA and the public services of providers have to function in parallel, without interference and in strict conformity with the rules of the German network agency (Bundesnetzagentur).

COMLAB ensures all these facets of system integration in a high-quality, professional and comprehensive way.

Within VDE 8, sub-project VDE 8.1 covers the roughly 106-km line section between Nuremberg and Erfurt. This section involves the construction of 22 tunnels totaling 41 km that are being equipped with TETRA BOS tunnel communication systems. From a functional viewpoint, these systems are an extension into the tunnels of the TETRA BOS digital communication network. This means technical, physical and organisational dependencies between the TETRA BOS communication systems in the tunnels and those in the open air. The nature of these dependencies in turn depends on how the systems are integrated within the larger TETRA BOS digital communication network.

The subsections Thüringen 1, Thüringen 2 and Bayern are each being equipped with two redundant Master Units (MU) that are directly connected to base stations specifically created for this purpose.

These Master Units feed signals to the tunnel communication stations, which in turn feed the tunnels via radiating cables. The tunnel system provides safety and security-relevant TETRA BOS communication for fire, police and rescue services and thus demands great attention to quality, reliability, monitoring and redundancy.