image: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has attended the latest meeting of a panel of experts to prepare norm EN 45545, which regulates fire safety in railway rolling stock, and during which the last revision of the final text was carried out. view more
Credit: UC3M
This press release is available in Spanish.
In this meeting of the JWG - the work group made up of European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) - the last revision of the text was carried out that will make up norm EN 45545, which affects the entire railroad industry, the operators, fire-testing laboratories and standardization entities. This meeting took place on the Leganés campus of the UC3M, under the auspices of the Master's in Fire Safety Engineering Program, from the Pedro Juan de Lastanosa Institute.
The final version of the text made within the framework of this meeting will be submitted to formal vote in the standardization committees of the different countries for its approval, and the norm will foreseeably be published at the end of 2012. . "After 20 years of intense discussion and debate between industry, operators and laboratories, and after incorporating important results from research, agreement was at least reached to consider a text that will guarantee the same level of safety for railway passengers in all countries," UC3M Professor José Luis Pérez Díaz, the Spanish representative at JWG pointed out. As the coordinator of the mirror group, its function is to transmit the different discussions to the agents involved in Spain, as well as the industries and operators, and in addition, to carry out these discussions from the point of view of these Spanish agents.
This is basic norm for railway vehicles to circulate freely all over Europe, according to the experts. Its purpose is to unify fire safety criteria on passenger trains in the different European countries which adopt it, so that trains complying can circulate without problems. "It improves safety, but it also facilitates free circulation and free competition in the railway sector," Professor Pérez Díaz asserted, director of the Master's in Fire Safety Engineering Program, from the Pedro Juan de Lastanosa Institute.