Cloud4Rail lays the track for virtualised railway signalling and control technology
From architectural concept to operational field testing: On August 27th 2026, DB InfraGO and Siemens Mobility demonstrated for the first time under real-world conditions how a Radio Block Center, as an example of a safety-critical application in digital signalling and train control technology, can be decoupled from the underlying hardware through virtualization. For the DB-owned on-premises cloud solution, only standard components were employed, consistent with those found in modern cloud data centers.
In the article ”Cloud4Rail: How Virtualisation is Transforming Signalling and Control Technology” we introduced the technical approach: applications for digital control-command and signalling technology are to be decoupled from vendor-specific hardware and, in the future, operated on modular, standardized IT platforms.
Together with Siemens Mobility, DB InfraGO took the approach from the lab to the Digital Rail Test Field in the Ore Mountains. During an actual train journey, an exemplary safety-critical railway application was operated on a virtualized platform using commercially available IT components. This marked the first demonstration of the technical integration of the jointly developed end-to-end solution in a real-world operational environment.
Guests from the funding Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, the project management agency, and the German Federal Railway Authority were invited to Scheibenberg station in DB InfraGO’s Digital Rail Test Field in the Ore Mountains. In their keynotes, the partners reaffirmed the importance of European standards and collaboration. Concluding the event, DB InfraGO and Siemens Mobility announced that they will now implement the tested architecture for an interlocking system in regular operations over the coming years with a first German pilot project. With this deployment in its own cloud environment, DB InfraGO is actively paving the way for a rapid large-scale deployment of the future-proof technology, making the rollout and operation of digital signalling and control systems faster and more cost-effective.
With a real train run over around 50 Eurobalises specially installed for this test, the project team demonstrated successful communication between the train and the virtualized Radio Block Centre (RBC) deployed trackside. The RBC software – during test operation not yet under safety responsibility –, including Siemens Mobility’s DS3 platform responsible for safe execution, ran in virtual machines on standard hardware.
A key role is played by the newly implemented Native Hardware Access (NHA) component developed as part of the project. It enables virtualized applications to access the required hardware information in a defined manner. The component has been published on GitHub as an open-source reference implementation, making it available to other stakeholders in the sector for testing and further development.
A joint technical article on the topic will appear in SIGNAL+DRAHT 09/2026 under the title “The first implementation of a virtualised railway signalling architecture up to SIL 4”.
