Characterisation of the EM disturbances affecting the safety of the railway communication systems

To insure interoperability of the transeuropean trains, new transmission systems (GSMR, Eurobalise) are developed in order to permit communications between trains and control centres. These systems have to be available and safe from an electromagnetic point of view, but the normalized methods to characterize electromagnetic noise in railway environment are not convenient for these applications. This paper presents new experimental methods to characterize the electromagnetic noise on board trains which are studied in the framework of the European project “Railcom”. The results of measurements realized both in time and in frequency domains, are analysed and some conclusions can be used as a first step to define a new standard for the considered systems.