Siemens Transportation Systems (TS) and China Railway Signal & Communication Corp. (CRSC, consortium leader) are equipping Beijing’s Metro Line 10, which will also serve the Olympic Park, with the most up-to-date signaling and control technology. This will make it possible to run trains at shorter headways and adjust operation more quickly to changing passenger volumes. Line 10 and the Olympic Branch Line will be put into operation when the 2008 Olympic Summer Games start in Beijing and will link the Olympic sites with the city center and other lines of the Beijing Metro. For the consortium the order is worth about EUR 30 million.

Line 10, which is still under construction, is about 25 kilometers long and extends from Wanliu in the northwest of the metropolitan area over a total of 22 stops to Jinsong in the southeast, directly connecting with Lines 4, 5 and 13 en route and meeting up with Line 1 at Guomao station. With its four stops and about 6 kilometers of track, the Olympic Branch Line branches off at Xiongmaohuandao Station and heads north in the direction of the Olympic center. Both of these lines will run completely underground. They will commence passenger service on July 1, 2008.

The lines will be equipped with Trainguard MT, the modular automatic train control system from Siemens. Thus, for the first time in Beijing's Metro network, moving block technology in combination with continuous bidirectional data transfer by WLAN radio is to be used on Line 10 and on the Olympic Branch Line.

Intermittent communication between the vehicle and the line, based on lineside electronic units and balises, will be installed as a fallback solution. Thus Siemens is providing an operationally adequate fallback solution to increase the availability of the overall system and, at the same time, the maximum possible safety and flexibility for the future metro operator. This fallback solution is based on the standard for ETCS Level 1.

The Siemens scope of delivery also includes the operation control center, the lineside facilities comprising the interlockings, the automatic train control and radio systems, and the on-board components for the 34 metro trains that will run on these lines.

The content to be supplied by the local partner CRSC involves the complete equipping of the depot with computer-based interlocking and microcomputer supervision system, the delivery of the point machines, signals for the main line and depot, cables as well as signal power supply system for the whole line.

This is the second project in China after metro lines 4 and 5 in Guangzhou to be equipped with the innovative and up-to-date automatic train control system from Siemens.