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Frauscher Marketing
Nov 21, 2025 | 7 min read
With over 99% of 69,000 odd route km of Indian railway network electrified and an urgent drive to adopt modern signalling and train control technologies at a very rapid pace, Indian Railways is poised to leapfrog directly into Rail 4.0, where safety, efficiency, and capacity expansion are more reliant on adoption of pathbreaking digital systems and solutions than incremental technological upgrades.
We spoke with Abhik Roy Chowdhury, Director of Services at Frauscher India, to understand how digital technologies are transforming Indian Railways and the role of Frauscher in enabling these changes. Here’s what he shared about the opportunities, challenges, and future trends in modernising Indian Railways.
Digitalisation of railway operations in India
Indian Railways is modernising its Signalling System with adoption of Electronic Interlocking, Automatic Signalling, and indigenous Train Protection Systems like Kavach. Furthermore, Indian Railways has joined the EULYNX consortium as an associate member indicating its preference to adopt EULYNX standards for modular and interoperable signalling subsystems.
A key component of this transformation is the deployment of advanced MSDAC systems across Indian Railways, ensuring SIL 4 accuracy in train detection. Modern SIL 4 data transmission and serial interfaces are also replacing legacy cabling and relay architectures to enable modular, interoperable signalling. This digital shift creates the foundation for advanced analytics and diagnostics that drive proactive maintenance and smarter operational decisions—ultimately paving the way for solutions like Frauscher Insights.
Frauscher Insights is our flagship diagnostic and analytical solution that overlays on our MSDAC systems with real-time monitoring, proactive AI/ML enabled diagnostics, and KPI dashboards. It acts as the digital intelligence layer, turning trackside digital data into actionable insights and making the MSDAC systems more available, reliable, resilient, and future-ready.
Operators can detect potential issues well before they occur, while remote access allows management oversight and decision making without being physically present on-site. This digital layer moves the railway infrastructure operations and maintenance from reactive attendance to breakdowns after they have occurred to proactive maintenance, automation, and intelligent decision-making, aligning with India’s digital ambitions.
Frauscher Insights to improve maintenance efficiency
Frauscher Insights combines predictive intelligence with digital workflows to improve both maintenance efficiency and reliability of its installed MSDAC network. Field teams further benefit from mobile-enabled dashboards and task management tools, enabling faster, coordinated responses, even in remote or low-bandwidth areas. Continuous monitoring of Frauscher MSDAC systems, point control and data transmission solutions detects anomalies early, while predictive alerts help schedule timely interventions.
By shifting from reactive to proactive maintenance, railway operators reduce unscheduled downtime, optimise resource deployment, and maintain 24x7 signalling uptime—critical for availability, punctuality and efficiency across India’s high-density network.
Challenges when adopting digital platforms like Frauscher Insights
Digitalising safety-critical systems bring concerns around cybersecurity and integration. Frauscher addresses these through the implementation of cybersecurity measures while upholding the highest level of safety. Cybersecurity measures, like dedicated security roles, threat modelling, vulnerability testing, supply chain risk management, and incident handling via the Frauscher PSIRT (Product Security Incident Response Team), are implemented according to IEC 62443-4-1.
Integration challenges are addressed through modular, scalable architecture and secure edge devices that maintain OT–IT separation. Coupled with a phased rollout, training, and ongoing support, this ensures smooth adoption and reliable operations across India’s diverse infrastructure and bandwidth conditions. The result is a digital solution that is secure, adaptable, and fully operational in Indian conditions.
Why Frauscher Insights is suited for India
Indian Railways is the lifeline of the country and carries a huge number of passengers daily across some of the busiest and most complex corridors in the world, where even minor delays can cascade into major operational disruptions and collateral consequences. Further the railway network and associated infrastructure is rapidly growing. Many new mainlines, metro rail, freight corridors, and intercity rapid rail transits are being opened to traffic every year. There is always a resource crunch to physically maintain them as per defined schedules.
Frauscher Insights is designed to meet these challenges in MSDAC maintenance by enabling:
Proactive maintenance: Detects potential issues before they occur, allowing proactive interventions
Shift from reactive to data-driven operations: Real-time analytics and dashboards help operators make informed decisions remotely
Early warnings and issue analysis: Continuous monitoring identifies anomalies and flags risks before failures occur. A potential breakdown is thus averted
Enhanced system availability: Critical trackside and signalling systems maintain uptime, especially in high-density corridors, reducing punctuality loss
Cybersecure operations: Edge-to-cloud data flow, IEC 62443-4-1 compliance, and PSIRT monitoring ensure safe digitalisation
By combining these capabilities, Frauscher Insights ensures more reliable, and efficient railway operations, making it particularly suited for India’s unique operational and security demands.
How digitalisation is shaping the future of Indian railways
India’s 2030 vision aims to build a future-ready railway system capable of safely and efficiently moving the ever-growing passenger and freight traffic. Digitalisation will be a key enabler to drive automation and scalability across the network. Some key trends shaping the future of digitalisation within railways include:
Shift from parallel to serial interfaces and data transmission: Parallel relay interfaces and transmission of data on copper cables would be replaced by serial interfaces and transmission over OFC and Radio
Deployment of EULYNX enabled object controllers: Adoption of EULYNX standards (Signal Interface Protocol) enables vendor agnostic subsystems to interoperate on standardised interfaces, thus decoupling the lifecycles of individual subsystems and preventing vendor lock-in. This reduces the overall lifecycle costs and allows flexible replacements across diverse legacy signalling systems
Shift from scheduled to proactive, condition-based maintenance and real-time diagnostics: Platforms such as Frauscher Insights will be used more to detect potential issues and direct limited maintenance resources based on condition of assets than maintenance as per fixed schedules
Use of AI and cloud-based asset management: Advanced monitoring and scheduling will enable data-driven decision-making at scale and efficient asset management
Together, these innovations will help Indian Railways meet its long-term goals of increased capacity and intelligent, resilient infrastructure. By combining technology, data, and operational insights, digitalisation will create a safe, secure, more efficient, and customer-focused railway network, fully aligned with broader Digital India initiatives.
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