Project milestones and ongoing developments

• Comprehensive exploratory talks and preliminary studies by FOEN and Empa

• Definition of the project specifications by FOEN and Empa including a project structure with 5 different work packages.

  Formulation of the project goal.

• Definition of the profiles of potential partners and first contacts.

• Preparation of a definitive project description consisting of content, time schedules and financing. An internal application was approved by the board of directors of FOEN and the final evaluation of project partners was started. By end of 2006 / beginning of 2007 contracts with the project team were signed.

• sonRAIL Kick-Off-Meeting in Basel

• Emission measurements on the railway line Wanzwil-Rothrist (both years) and Lausanne-Freiburg (2007)

• sonRAIL project meeting in Basel

• sonRAIL project meeting in Basel (incl. sonRAIL advisory board)

• Indirect rail roughness measurements along 3000 km on the net of the Swiss Federal Railways using a measuring train assorted and operated by PROSE

• Final sonRAIL project meeting in Basel (incl. sonRAIL advisory board and invited guests)

• Issue of the sonRAIL Project documentation 

• As a first large-scale application of the model, noise mapping along the north-south corridor through Switzerland is performed comprising an area of 340 km2, 50 km of railway tracks, about 30’000 buildings, 17 noise barriers and 172’000 receiver points.

• 24 hour validation measurements from close to track up to a propagation distance of 900 m by Prose, Empa und LCC Consulting in Steinen (canton Schwyz) along the Gotthard railway line (report from Empa, report from Prose).

• Kick-Off meeting for the project sonRAIL-SpeedUp, which was conducted by LCC Consulting and Empa with the goal to further develop the scientific model into a distributable software product. Apart from integrating the acoustical model into a modern and user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) on the basis of a geographical information system (GIS), a substantial acceleration of the calculation speed was defined as a major goal. Additionally the range of application of the sound propagation model was extended to road traffic noise.

• Validation measurements in situations behind noise barriers by Empa in Wichtrach (canton Bern) along the Lötschberg railway line.

• Successful completion of the project sonRAIL-SpeedUp. With the acceleration measures an impressive reduction of calculation times by a factor of about 200 had been achieved with only minor compromises in accuracy: The average and standard deviation compared to the original model are throughout well below 1 dB(A).

• The Federal Office of Transport FOT decided together with the Federal Office for the Environment of Switzerland (FOEN) that railway noise calculations for new lines shall be performed from 2012 on with the sonRAIL emission model.

• Launch of D-noise, a commercially available version of sonRAIL