Newsletter Q3 2026: New Project MscViewer, Digital Sovereignty, InnoTrans

22 October 2026

Welcome to the first OpenRail Quarterly Newsletter. From July to September 2026, our community met online every month, we published a position paper on digital sovereignty and welcomed a new project.

TL;DR

  • MscViewer joined OpenRail as a new project
  • New releases for OSRD and the Netzgrafik-Editor
  • Our position paper “Digital Sovereignty in Rail” sets out choice, control and influence
  • OpenRail exhibited with its own stand at InnoTrans for the first time, and OSRD was recognised as an Official World Innovation
  • Three Community Meetups covered two Hack4Rail projects and the OSRD roadmap

Projects

New project - MscViewer. MscViewer completed its onboarding as an OpenRail project this quarter. Created and maintained by Greenstones GmbH and already in production use at SBB, it manages Nokia MSC/MSS configurations through a modern web interface, with map views, dependency graphs and an AI agent for natural language queries. It can be tailored to specific requirements such as GSM-R and is available under the MIT licence. Explore more

OSRD. Over the summer, the Open Source Railway Designer published releases 1.2.19 to 1.2.24, followed by version 1.3.0 on 18 September 2026, days before its world premiere at InnoTrans. Highlights include hourly timetable patterns, backtracking in the short-term path search (STDCM), privileges for projects and rolling stock, a journey search and a redesigned home page. Translation work has also started in Italian, Hungarian, Romanian and Simplified Chinese. Explore more

Netzgrafik-Editor. The backend published releases 2.9.0 and 2.9.1, with a faster query for timetable variants and updated dependencies. Explore more

Insights

Digital Sovereignty in Rail: OpenRail’s Position. Digital sovereignty is a topic no organization running critical infrastructure can ignore. We published a position paper outlining how open source provides the foundation for choice, control, and influence over the digital infrastructure that rail depends on, and calling for the railway and open source communities to combine forces. Read more

Events and community

InnoTrans 2026: A Double Premiere for Open Source in Rail. InnoTrans 2026 marked a double premiere for the OpenRail Association: its first stand of its own at the world’s largest trade fair for the rail sector and OSRD recognised as an Official World Innovation. Over four days, presentations, a roundtable at the Mobility+ Corner and many conversations showed the growing interest in Open Source across the railway sector. Read more

Community Meetups. Every second Thursday of the month, the community meets online:

  • 9 July: Hack4Rail Taxi Voucher Challenge. Two teams from the challenge presented their projects: DBringer, the Hack4Rail winner, and TaxiTetrix, a taxi pooling solution. The community discussed how both ideas could continue to grow beyond the hackathon.
  • 13 August: Machine-Readable Railway Regulations. The team behind OSCAL4Rail, another project from Hack4Rail 2026, showed how railway regulations can become machine-readable and what this could mean for interoperability, automation and digital innovation in rail.
  • 10 September: OSRD Roadmap Review. The OSRD maintainers presented their short- and long-term plans and showed how the community can get involved.

Upcoming events are listed on our community page. Read more

Get involved

OpenRail is built by its community, and this newsletter is too.

OpenRail Association Quarterly Newsletter Q3 2026