A ceremony was held on August 18 to mark the start of construction of last remaining 21km segment of the 143km Nagasaki – Hakata Shinkansen between Isahaya and Nagasaki.

WORKERS laid the final section of track on August 14 on a new Yuan 4.5bn ($US 706m) line in southwest China which will eventually provide a second standard-gauge connection to Vietnam.

A performance-based track geometry system incorporating trained neural networks has been developed by TTCI. It is already being used by four railways and is now being tested on the Dallas light rail network, as senior engineer Charity Duran Ketchum explains.

Ecostar 4 is a new generation of point machines which can be used in a variety of applications and is compatible with most interlockings, explains Alfred Pölinger, technical marketing manager with Voestalpine Hytronics.

SENER, Spain, has signed an ownership, protection and license distribution agreement with Spanish infrastructure manager Adif, the Polytechnic University of Madrid, and the Cidaut Foundation to promote the use of an innovate sleeper designed to tackle the problem of flying ballast on high-speed lines.

AFTER a subdued start to 2012, Vossloh has reported a healthy increase in second quarter sales, which rose 4.5% compared with the same period last year. Overall, first half sales rose 1.8% to €571.3m, while the group's order backlog stands at €1.5bn.

BRITAIN's prime minister Mr David Cameron has announced plans today to invest an additional £4.2bn to upgrade key sections of the rail network in England and Wales between 2014 and 2019 on top of the £5.2bn already committed for projects currently underway such as Crossrail and Thameslink.

GREATER Stockholm Local Transport (SL) has awarded Strukton Rail two new contracts to maintain infrastructure on the 106km Stockholm metro network and the 65km narrow-gauge Roslagsbanan.

BRITISH infrastructure manager Network Rail (NR) has launched an additional ultrasonic test train, which is fitted with two separate ground penetrating radar units capable of detecting irregularities in the ballast and formation at depths of up to two metres, and a laser rail profile scanner.

RUSSIAN Railways (RZD) has signed a memorandum of understanding with Evraz for a five-year contract to supply rails starting in 2013.The contract which will run until 2017 is worth around Roubles 90bn ($US 2.8bn).