A half year after the official launch of the OpenRail Association, five Open Source projects have already become part of the organization. Even after this short time, two of these projects - one from the SNCF, the other from the SBB - have already started to collaborate directly. This collaboration increases the efficiency of both developments and creates synergies that benefit both projects and, ultimately, their customers. This collaboration was made possible thanks to the OpenRail Association.

Netzgrafikeditor meets Open Source Railway Designer

Netzgrafikeditor (NGE) is an Open Source project primarily developed by the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). NGE is used within SBB for the macroscopic creation, modification and analysis of long-term timetable concepts. The SNCF’s Open Source Railway Designer (OSRD) has a similar focus, but has so far focused more on microscopic medium and short-term timetabling, capacity analysis and simulation. Both are part of the OpenRail Association.

A few weeks ago, a productive collaboration started between the two development teams. This eventually led to contributions from the SNCF-led OSRD team to the SBB-led NGE project. In return, the OSRD team integrates NGE components into their software. Prior to the existence and membership of the OpenRail Association, such a fruitful collaboration would have been highly unlikely, even if both teams had known about each other.

Lowering the threshold to use railway software

To enable more interested parties to test OpenRail projects, the Netzgrafikeditor team has worked hard to make its software publicly available. This allows individuals to experiment with NGE using their own datasets. Interested users can create an account, develop their own timetable concepts and even share them with others. This stems from the belief that rail-specific software should be accessible to rail professionals without extensive IT knowledge.

The step towards publication was made possible thanks to a collaboration with the Flatland Association, an organization committed to open innovation, which contributed the necessary features and hosts the public instance of Netzgrafikeditor in its cloud.

These examples show that collaboration based on Open Source principles can bring immense value and efficiencies to the industry as a whole. We thank everyone involved for their commitment and look forward to the next opportunities within the OpenRail community.