The community has a long track record of developing market-making innovations. Many of them stem from the state’s rail specialists, others from its ‘generalists’. Prime among them: Siemens AG’s Mobility department, which maintains production operations in Nuremberg and Munich, and which is one of the world’s leaders in its field.

Siemens is one of the few companies in the world which is capable of offering all-encompassing rail systems. Comprised in these are rolling stock (including locomotives and railcars) and infrastructure (railway control centers, train running control and rail guidance systems). The latter are available on both entire-system and individual-module bases, and incorporate the products and services supplied by Bavarian companies.

DB Systemtechnik, the operating arm of Germany’s rail corporation, operates an engineering facility in Munich’s northern Freimann district. Employing 200 staff members and comprising 10 testing centers, it is the largest of its kind in Europe. The facility’s brief is the optimization of line-throughput, vehicle-use and infrastructure; the procurement of rail vehicles; and the monitoring and improvement of maintenance operations.

A number of Bavarian companies are leaders in the rail industry’s individual sectors. One such sector is that of distortion-proof track ways. Used by high-speed trains, these are produced by Max Bögl and Rail.One (formerly Pfleiderer Track Systems). Both companies are located in Neumarkt, a town in the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria.

Operated by the MVG and VAG authorities, the public transport systems in Munich and Nuremberg are role models for the entire world. These systems employ such innovations as RUBIN, the world’s fully-automatic (an electronic guidance system replaces human drivers) subway.

Bavaria’s rail technologies industry is characterized by a state-wide spread of location—with the metropolitan areas of Nuremberg-Erlangen and of Munich being the industry’s nodes—and an individual part or subsystem specialization of manufacturing and service provision.

Founded in 1996, the Center for Transportation and Logistics Neuer Adler e. V. (CNA e.V.) forms the node of greater Nuremberg’s highly variegated rail technologies network. Its members are manufacturers, scientific institutes, transport authorities and companies, chambers of commerce and industry, municipal and district governments, and others. CNA has successfully worked to make rail and logistic technologies and services one of the metropolitan region’s business mainstays. CNA has been entrusted with the management of the platform for rail technologies established by Bavaria’s campaign for clusters. This platform serves to facilitate the forging and furthering of the networks of relationships existing among rail technologies’ players: manufacturers, suppliers, operators of transport systems, research institutes, service providers and dedicated institutions. The objective is to ensure the optimal intermeshing of links of supply and technological development forging the rail industry’s chain of value-added. Doing so, in turn, will yield the growth giving all of these players impetus for further development.

Including those at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and those at the universities of applied sciences in Augsburg and in Nuremberg, the state’s institutes of mechanical and transport engineering are prolific sources of innovations solving component-related problems, and creating new ways of developing and planning transport systems (with the latter a specialty of Munich’s Technical University).

Such innovations also stem from other research institutes in Bavaria, including those whose activities would not, at first glance, seem to be germane to the field. Case-in-point: the center maintained by DLR (Germany’s Aerospace Agency) in Oberpfaffenhofen. The center participated in the honing of the ICE’s aerodynamics.

As is the case with the rest of Bavaria’s transport infrastructure, the state’s high-performance rail grid constitutes an essential business advantage. And this is not only because the grid assures companies and travelers of a high speed, capacity and extent of transport. It’s also because the grid is used by a large and increasing number of state-of-technology locomotives and railcars. These are owned and operated by Deutsche Bahn and by private rail corporations. Entailed in their use are the installation and daily employment of equally advanced tracks and track ways; operations guidance and security systems; and traffic management and customer information networks (including the DEFAS project).

Further information is available from the rail technologies cluster, and from „Key Technologies in Bavaria“ This databank contains entries on Bavaria’s rail technologies companies.