The Future of Railway Systems

The future of railway systems from the manufacturer’s view point

This report describes the future of railways, which have come to cover an extremely large area. Moreover, railways touch the lives of people in many different sectors as shown in the figure above. Therefore, in order to understand the future of railways, we must look at them from a number of different viewpoints, including those of people that use railways, those planning urban projects based around railways, those profiting from operating railways, and those providing railway systems. Due to the particular nature of railways, the future is often discussed from the viewpoint of railway users. Since the early days, railways have continued to attract and charm users by providing rail service, and many researchers have described the future of railways from the viewpoint of users. This suggests a major difference from other public utilities such as electric power and water. Since people are more interested in railways than in other public utilities, it is not surprising that many papers have been published on the role of railways in urban planning based on the viewpoints of users. Therefore, this report will leave discussion of the future of railways from these viewpoints to other papers and focus on the less commonly discussed subject of the future of railway systems from the viewpoint of railway system suppliers (which, of course, includes Hitachi).

A.Kawabata
Department Manager,
Hitachi Research lab.
HITACHI Ltd.