Andreas Schöbel on railway resilience to alpine hazards in Austria
Dr Andreas Schöbel of OpenTrack Railway Technology explained why nineteenth-century Austrian rail lines that follow river valleys are so exposed to floods, and what the ENHANCE partnership analysis found.
Dr Andreas Schöbel, research expert and projects manager at OpenTrack Railway Technology (ORT) GmbH and a docent of railway operation, spoke about the company’s role in ENHANCE. ORT is a consultancy for railway operations and an ENHANCE partner.
Its software, OpenTrack, began as a PhD thesis at ETH Zürich and is used to design railway infrastructure and plan timetables. Within ENHANCE, ORT contributed to the case study on railway transport resilience to alpine hazards in Austria. Schöbel had worked with Austrian Railways (ÖBB) before, on a flood warning system for railways and on flood risk assessment.
His explanation of the exposure was historical. Many Austrian lines were built in the nineteenth century along rivers, and that ties the railway closely to flood risk. The hazards also act differently: rain damages the track, while storms mainly hit the overhead lines.
One finding of the partnership analysis was striking. The Ministry of Transport had no staff dedicated to the resilience of alpine rail. In a partnership meant to share responsibility between the infrastructure operator and the state, one side had nobody assigned to the task.
The note on Schöbel listed several of his publications on railway flood warning and flood risk mapping from 2007 to 2010. The case study is described in the alpine railway case record, and other ENHANCE cases in the case-study atlas.