The 34^th railML conference took place on the 14^th of November 2018 in Prague. As usual also this autumn conference was dedicated to the English-speaking community and thus brought together roughly 50 participants from all over Europe.

railML2.4, which was released officially on the 7^th of October was presented by the railML infrastructure and timetable coordinators, Christian Rahmig and Philip Wobst. railML 3.1 was presented with its novelties by Christian Rahmig and a Release Candidate published on the day. Christian commented: “We are happy that railML3 has now reached a level of maturity, which makes a usage in practice possible. Before releasing a final version, we would be happy to receive feedback on the Release Candidate from the community to ensure that it will satisfy the needs of today and tomorrow.”. Please contact railML.org for feedback. The final version of railML^® 3 (railML 3.1) will be published until the end of this year.

Another interesting presentation was held by representatives from Standard Norge, the Norwegian standardisation body. They were invited by railML.org to present the possibilities and consequences of transforming railML into an ISO standard. A final decision if this is something that shall be followed up upon will be made by the end of this year.

As usual, also the industry was invited to talk about their experiences and developments with railML. This year Thales Germany and Jernbanedirektoratet – the Norewgian railway directorate – took the chance to present their railML extensions to the community- HS2 presented their asset information transfer strategy and a new partner from Italy introduced themselves to the community and presented a new tool with railML interface.

The conference was framed by a railML3 dissemination workshop on Tuesday and a railML3.2 Interlocking and Infrastructure kick-off meeting the day after. In the latter the use cases that shall be integrated in railML3.2 and the working groups where settled down. For the infrastructure schema the following use cases where selected:

• ETCS Track Net (ETCS)
• Schematic Track Plan (SCTP)
• Integrated Traffic Management System (ITMS), no wiki description available.
• Track Geometry (TRGE), first development will be announced. 

For the interlocking subschema the following use cases where selected:

• Routes for Timetable Simulation (RSIM) 
• Interlocking Module Engineering Data (IDEM)

Should you be interested in joining one of the development groups, please contact us. Also get in touch with us, if your company or programme needs support of additional use cases for railML 3.2 or later versions.

All events took place in the centrum of Prague on invitation of the Czech infrastructure manager SŽDC. We would like to thank Miloš Futera - railML contact person at SŽDC - for the great organisation and hospitality!

The slides of the conference are available for download of our website.