What is European Railway Agency (ERA)

The need for time- and cost-efficient tests is highly relevant for state-of-the-art safety-related train control and rail traffic management systems. Those systems get increasingly more complex and so testing becomes a more and more and important cost factor. This chapter discusses some approaches to relocate tests from the field to the lab, reduce cost and duration while improving quality of lab tests. The European Train Control System (ETCS) is used as an example, but the approaches and results can be applied to other systems as well, for instance interlocking.