During the weekend of 9 and 10 February, BAM Rail and VolkerRail went live with an application developed by Strukton Railinfra for automated decommissioning requests (GAB).

This initiative represents a unique cooperative relationship between three rail contractors who will now jointly process around 80% of the requests for decommissioning via the same system. The GAB application drafts the decommissioning requests, submits them and monitors their status throughout the process. What’s more, you can see if other contractors have submitted requests and/or if these have been accepted or not.

When drafting a request, the program automatically checks if another request has already been submitted for that time at the same location. In short, the new system offers advantages for the rail sector as a whole, enabling rail contractors to utilise scarce capacity resources more safely and effectively.
GAB was developed by Strukton Railinfra and is offered via the Internet to around 300 users. The aim during the next phase is to establish a digital link with ProRail.