Christian Sprauer

CEO - Railnova

Transforming The Rail Industry By Connecting Assets to Engineers

Hello Christian. Please introduce Railnova to our readers in a couple of sentences.

Hello. Yes, Railnova connects assets to make rail transport reliable. We provide our customers with innovative and flexible solutions and accompany them to a comprehensive predictive maintenance and data-driven efficient asset management strategy.

You'll detail this more for me. First, what is your company's history? What led you to this?

Indeed, you don't get up in the morning one day and say, "I'm going to digitise trains to make them more reliable." The fact is, I was born into it. My dad sold trains. He sold trains worldwide for a factory that Alstom later bought.

So in 2010, I was in charge of a fleet of 400 locomotives that operated in twelve countries. And we had no information. We didn't know when the locomotives broke down. We didn't know where they were. It took a lot of work to manage and handle the traffic. And that's when having always had an entrepreneurial streak, I decided to go for it and start connecting these trains, retrieving alarms and essential information.

How did you do it?

I had a trainee at the time who was an electronics genius who decided to start with me, and it is thanks to him we managed to make the first devices that we installed in the trains.

Railnova has developed different solutions and products adapted to the diverse needs of our customers. For example, we have a device for which we have a worldwide patent. It's plug-and-play for all types of trains, regardless of the manufacturer. So we install the device on the train, collect all the information from all the sub-systems such as air conditioning, the engine and the electrical system, summarise this and send it to the control centre if we have an alarm.

What exactly does this device record?

For example, it retrieves the air conditioning's temperature to see if the passenger compartment is cool enough. It will also retrieve the water levels in the toilette tank because a train with no water can't leave. The device will retrieve the state of the electrical system to see how well it functions.

I have an excellent example from a few months ago. A freight train was blocked in eastern France, obstructing all regional traffic and traffic in Luxembourg and the east part of Belgium. And thanks to the Railnova device on this freight train, we saw that it was a circuit breaker. It was this part that prevented communication between the two locomotives. The control centres saw that it could not be solved quickly, but they could still deviate all traffic. They were able to make the best decisions very fast. And by noon, traffic was normal again. Without this information, it could have taken all day, or more, to normalise traffic.

So you retrieve all this information and send it to your client. Is that correct?

We retrieve the data, analyse it locally, and from the six thousand parameters it will measure, we only send a few that are important. And it is the client who then processes this information and makes decisions to try to avoid failures and delays.

What technology do you rely on?

The technologies in question are edge computing, connected objects, hardware and electronics. It is also big data, cloud, and artificial intelligence to isolate the important alarms from these vast volumes of data.

We started before the terms IoT and artificial intelligence were known by everyone. At the time, we had to do everything ourselves. It was pretty challenging, and the Railnova team managed to put everything together.

Tell us who the professionals around you are now. Because you were two at the start, how many now?

When we established the company in 2010, we were just two people, and today we are a team of sixty. We have teams dealing with electronics, big data, the cloud and the user software our customers use. We are located in Brussels but have also employees working remotely from Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Who are your customers?

Our customers are train operators, leasing companies, ECMs, national railways and integrators. We are present in 16 countries, mainly in Europe.

So far, we have connected 3,200 trains out of the 130,000 trains in Europe. And we have 7,000 railway stakeholders all around Europe using the Railnova platform in real-time.

What are the advantages of working with you?

Railnova's significant advantage is the patents' universal connectivity. This means that we can connect to any train regardless of the manufacturer, the subsystems, and the interphases. So that is advantage number one.

And the second big advantage is that we allow our customers, who have a lot of expertise, to deploy their know-how in a proprietary way. They can configure the devices themselves remotely and set specific alarms.

We accompany our clients from start to finish. A company that is connected to its trains must change their approach. It must move from reactive processes to predictive processes. So it has to anticipate breakdowns; when it has an alarm, it must act immediately. And that is a strong cultural shift that we help our customers achieve.

Are there copycats?

No copycats because the technology is so unique. And not many companies are trying to connect trains from different manufacturers. Everyone is usually focused on solving the connectivity challenge for a single manufacturer.

What is Railnova's goal for the coming years?

In the first phase, connect ten thousand trains and then fleets and countries. Make key rail stakeholders trust us on big projects so that they can move forward even faster, improve the reliability of their trains, and make the rail industry more successful. Because today the challenge of rail transport is the quality of service.

Will your train arrive on time at Amsterdam? You can't be sure. Trains are, as we know, the most sustainable means of transport. It's forty times fewer carbon emissions than a car. On the other hand, in terms of quality of service, the train is not there yet, and that is what we help our customers with.

So, the final objective will be to help our customers connect more subsystems and enter a dynamic of one hundred per cent of defects detected.

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