Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ) national railway company and French multinational railway supplies company Alstom agreed July 30 to cooperate on the development of digital technologies for railway, including signalling, centralisation and blocking.
The agreement came during a visit to Nur-Sultan by French Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire.
The French minister was briefed by the production departments of Elektrovoz Kurastyru Zauyty, an electric locomotive production plant in the capital which a joint vernture between KTZ and Alstom. He was presented locomotive number Z8A0008, which was manufactured under an agreement with the Azerbaijan Railways. According to the agreement, 50 locomotives will be manufactured in Kazakhstan for the Azerbaijani company.
“This plant is the most visible evidence of economic cooperation between Kazakhstan and France. The partnership in the development of railways is an important strategic direction for our country. It is a great honour for me to attend the solemn ceremony of sending a locomotive for export to Azerbaijan. We intend to continue our partnership in the railway field,” said the minister.
He also highlighted the importance of cooperation in railway signalling equipment, saying, “We would like Alstom to equip Kazakhstan’s railway stations with alarm systems.”
The memorandum signed during La Maire’s visit between Kazakhstan Temir Zholy and Alstom concerns the development of digital technologies in the field of railway signalling systems, centralisation and blocking as well as the future implementation of technical solutions for upgrading the signalling systems at priority railway stations.
“The memorandum… pursues the main goal – cooperation in digitisation and automation of processes in railway transport. The first step is to automate or signal large stations with a hundred or more arrows. In the future, we will cooperate on the digitisation of railway transport. As you know, several projects of our company were included in Digital Kazakhstan national programme,” Kazakhstan Temir Zholy’s Managing Director Batyr Kotyrev said.
“Today, our devices have been in operation more than 35-40 years. They comply with the requirements of traffic safety. But everything in the world is developing, and they are morally obsolete. Therefore, there are already modern systems in the world. We have built 2,500 kilometres of new railways over the past few years, and we have already used similar modern solutions that meet all the requirements of the digital railway system. Now we are considering the possibility of using alarm systems in collaboration with Alstom,” he said.
