The organising committee are pleased to announce that the 5th instalment of the IET International Conference on Railway Engineering (ICRE) will be held from the 12th to the 13th of May 2016 in Belgium. The 2016 event, which will be the first time the conference has been held in Europe, will centre on the theme of “Enhancing Railway Operations” and will include a mix of keynote speeches, technical sessions, and site visits. The ICRE is held every two to three years and aims to provide a forum for sharing knowledge and experience, promoting collaboration among practitioners, and reporting applications of new technologies in railway engineering. The previous instalment of the conference, ICRE 2014, was held in Hong Kong and brought together railway professionals from around the world to discuss the theme of “Integrating Customer Experience in the Railway”.

As part of a two-stage process, the organising committee would like to take this opportunity to invite the submission of abstracts for presentation at ICRE 2016. Abstracts should be up to 500 words in length, and may focus on any topic related to the theme of “Enhancing Railway Operations”. Papers addressing the introduction of technologies novel to the industry are particularly welcome. Suggestions include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Control, command and communication (Operations and Planning; Traffic Management and Simulation)
• Energy (Sustainability; Energy and Power)
• Infrastructure (Infrastructure and Maintenance; Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety [RAMS]; Remote Condition Monitoring [RCM])
• Rolling stock (RCM; RAMS; Vehicles and Aerodynamics)
• Information (Passenger Information; Open Data)
• Customer experience (End-to-End Journeys; Multimodal Transport)