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TRAIN SAFETY IS "MADE IN ITALY"
Rome - (IGN) - It's called ROGER, an acronym for "rilievo ottico geometria rotaia" (optical rail geometry measurement). It's a train, a small convoy consisting of an engine and four carriages and almost boring to look at. Except for the fact that it is packed with really special, entirely Italian, technology and intended to do what would otherwise require the work of hundreds of technicians: check the parameters of a railway line, meter by meter. It is such a unique product on the world scene that it has allowed Mer Mec (www.mermec.it), a company located in Monopoli, in the Province of Bari, that builds it, to win a series of top-level orders. The latest, in chronological order, is going to the Swiss National Railroad, which is taking delivery of a new machine, equipped with the most sophisticated technology, to diagnosis the usage condition of its tracks. Before that, it was the turn of the French National Railroad: the SNCF asked for bids to provide a complete service to measure the comfort on-board the carriages of the TGV, the first, and most famous, high-speed train in the world. And Mer Mec won it the contract for a value of 5 million Euro. And it is also in the running for the contract to provide all the diagnostic systems for the future high-speed line that will connect Peking and Shanghai.
The story of Mer Mec and Angelo Pertosa, the man who founded and heads it, began in the Sixties. In those days, the company manufactured small trailers for tractors and sold agricultural machinery in Puglia with the mark Meridional Meccanica sas. Then, towards the end of the Seventies, it entered the railroad sector, producing carts, and finally, at the beginning of the Nineties, after assuming the current name of Mer Mec spa, developing opto-electronic applications for the automatic control of the state of railroad infrastructures. The prototype of the ROGER system was created in 1994 and is the basis for all the measurement systems and vehicles developed by the company that have been meeting with growing success in all markets until it reached sales of almost 30 million Euro in 2004, with almost three-fourths earned abroad. "In the Eighties," explained Angelo Pertosa, "we realized that there was an opportunity to develop innovative technologies that no other competitor could offer. So, beginning in 1988, we dedicated ourselves exclusively to diagnostic systems for railroad lines. And the results prove we were right."
In effect, ROGER is unique in the entire world. Ninety tons of materials that, speeding at 200 kilometers an hour, subject the tracks to their maximum stress. The system checks the electrical plants that power the line. The optical system can work at speeds higher than 300 kilometers an hour and makes over 2,000 measurements a second. It measures the geometry of the electric line and the state of wear of the wires, with a maximum margin of error of a tenth of a millimeter. In addition, a complex system of sensors measures values for the rails and tracks and even the acceleration that develops on the axes of the wheel and that is transmitted to the body of the carriage, influencing passenger comfort. The small convoy hooked to ROGER's engine contains the system's diagnostic unit, which allows monitoring the correct operation of all on-board equipment, and consists of twenty-four laser systems, forty-three optical sensors and TV cameras, forty-seven accelerometers, fifty-seven different computers and an inertial platform that is considered to be unique of its kind in the world.
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