Round about 70 people took the chance to travel to the European capital Brussels on the 14^th of November to participate at the 32^nd railML.org conference. Upon invitation of Jernbanedirektoratet the conference took place in a unique location: Norges Hus – the conference facilities of the Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway.

Christian Rahmig, railML.org Infrastructure coordinator, entered the stage first, presenting railML 3.1 to the curios audience. The new railML version was published on the 31^st of October after a lengthy period of high quality development in three smaller working groups: Two focusing on specific, in railML 3.1 implemented, use cases – Network Statement and Schematic Track Plan -, a third is continuously working on documentation. Due to the big amount of detailed questions and technical interest in this topic, railML.org overall coordinator Vasco Paul Kolmorgen suggested to organise a workshop on railML 3 dissemination in near future. Roughly 30 conference participants showed great interest in participating and already signed up preliminary for this event. railML.org will organise and come back to all interested parties by email and publish more information on the website. Should you have interest in participating please contact us.

Subsequently NorRailView - the first implementation of the use case “Schematic Track Plan” was presented. After a lunch break of intense networking the DAS (Driver Advisory System) data exchange using a railML import interface of Siemens was presented amongst other topics. Furthermore Professor Frank Ortmeier, Xitaso (Germany) opened new perspectives with presenting his innovation “Print2railML”, a semi-automatic approach to digitalizing paper track plans.

The conference was traditionally closed by railML.org overall coordinator Vasco Paul Kolmorgen giving a brief overview of railML.org´s activities in the past year and plans for the future. With “One more thing…” he announced the newest plan, closed the successful conference and raised a lot of attention: railSON - railML goes web.

The feedback of the participants during the conference was very positive, which is why we are already looking forward to organising the next confernces in 2018. A German-speaking conference will take place in spring 2018 in Austria, an English-speaking conference in autumn 2018. The dates, venues and further information will be made available on our website.

All slides are available for download on our website. Please note that the download is only available for registered and logged in useres.