ERTMS procurement: separate streams, gated by approvals

On 22 December 2025, DB InfraGO awarded the first planning section of its ETCS project between Flensburg and Maschen without publishing a new call for competition. Its award notice, published on 24 December 2025, gives the reason: a call for competition had already been made, for the prequalification.¹

Deutsche Bahn runs a qualification system for ETCS trackside work: its notice of 10 December 2025 asks for a supplier or developer of approved international ETCS or a company Deutsche Bahn has prequalified, and warns that qualifying promises no place in any competition.² Under the EU utilities directive, suppliers must be able to apply to such a system at any time.³ For a firm not yet on the list, the practical question is how long qualification takes, not whether the list has closed. How such systems work is the subject of our guide to rail qualification systems.

ERTMS work comes to the market in separate streams, trackside, onboard and radio, and for a signalling supplier much of what decides who can bid is settled before a notice appears: in the approvals a product must hold, in the EU Agency’s check of draft trackside specifications, and at some buyers in a qualification system or a framework with few suppliers.

In the EU’s technical specification for signalling, ERTMS is train protection (ETCS), radio communication and automated train operation, and its Class A radio systems are GSM-R and FRMCS, the Future Railway Mobile Communication System.⁴ The trans-European transport network regulation requires ERTMS on the core network by 31 December 2030, with exceptions for certain connections, deployed trackside and on board in step.⁵ The approval rules below come from the EU’s rail interoperability directive, which does not apply to metros, to trams and light rail, or to functionally separate networks used only for local, urban or suburban passenger services.⁶ This guide is about main-line railways.

The Flensburg–Maschen section is four new electronic interlockings and the adaptation of others, in a project that will equip the lines with ETCS Level 2 with signals and PZB. Trafikverket’s notice published on 17 December 2025 is for an execution contract to introduce ERTMS at Fosieby and Lernacken, estimated at SEK 230 million. Both name price as the award criterion.^{1, 7}

Trafikverket also buys the signalling system itself for groups of control areas: on its page updated on 29 May 2026, it said it was procuring its existing ERTMS system for about 20 further control areas, with the procurement to be advertised in the autumn or winter of 2026 and the areas upgraded during 2029–2036.⁸ A trackside pipeline is a list of places, each with its own date, and the system and the works can reach the market as different contracts.

In the EU, before any call for tenders for ERTMS trackside equipment, the European Union Agency for Railways checks that the technical solutions in the draft tender specifications are fully in line with the technical specifications for interoperability. The Agency says within one month whether the applicant’s file, with the draft specifications, is complete, and within two months of receiving all relevant information issues a positive decision or names the deficiencies. If the draft specifications change after a positive decision, the applicant informs the Agency and the national safety authority without undue delay; that authority later authorises placing the trackside in service.⁶ So the technical solution of an EU trackside tender is largely set in its draft specifications before the tender opens.

DB InfraGO’s award notice published on 23 December 2025 is for developing, manufacturing and installing ETCS equipment on seven class 721.3 driving trailers in its own machine pool, commissioning them and obtaining all the necessary approvals, for EUR 7,450,000.⁹

In Great Britain, Network Rail’s year-three update of its plan for digital signalling, on a forecast as at February 2026, reports that procuring and mobilising some fitment contracts is taking longer than planned, and that design approvals for the first-in-class fitment of the Class 66 locomotive have been delayed.¹¹

Network Rail’s planned procurement notice of 31 July 2026 is for Package 1 of its charter and heritage onboard ETCS fitment framework, a single-supplier framework to design, supply, fit and test ETCS on existing locomotive classes in that sector, estimated at £140,123,500 excluding VAT.¹² The summary of changes published with it explains why Network Rail dropped its earlier plan for three suppliers competing for each class in mini-tenders, in favour of one supplier commissioned directly: market feedback was that low volume commitments, fragmented opportunities and uncertain workload would make a multi-supplier model unattractive. It also cut the scope to five priority classes, about 67–122 vehicles, which Network Rail says gives suppliers a clearer minimum volume commitment, and replaced a target cost with a fixed price indexed to CPI.¹³

The first-in-class design is what an onboard buyer least wants to pay for twice: Network Rail justifies a framework term beyond the Procurement Act’s standard eight years because re-tendering during delivery would mean repeating it.

The European Commission reports the ERTMS projects supported under the second Connecting Europe Facility in two groups: trackside, covering ETCS, interlocking and Class A radio, and onboard, covering vehicles.¹⁴ Adif’s notice published on 30 July 2026 is for a service contract to maintain, operate and renew the central systems of its high-speed GSM-R core network, with centralised telecommunications management, energy remote control and the telecommunications and other installations on named lines. It runs for 48 months with a possible 12-month renewal, and the estimate of EUR 181,268,319.30 covers the whole scope.¹⁵ In Austria, ÖBB-Infrastruktur runs a qualification system for planning, supplying, integrating and operating FRMCS systems; its notice of 9 July 2026 stresses that this is not a tender, and that firms entered in its register are invited to tender for specific contracts directly, without a further notice.¹⁶

So a radio supplier may meet radio inside a funded trackside project, as a network service of several years, as at Adif, or behind a qualification system, as at ÖBB-Infrastruktur.

Network Rail’s year-three update says it has awarded a development contract to each of the four suppliers on its Train Control Systems Framework, with final products expected before the end of the control period on 31 March 2029.¹¹

ProRail’s axle-counter contract for ERTMS, announced on 7 December 2021, lets the supplier deliver for at most eight years after successful development, with 2032 as the expected year of the last delivery, followed by 25 years of maintenance services, for at most 100 million euros.¹⁷ Its framework notice published on 1 April 2026, by competitive dialogue, is for a single-supplier framework to develop an object controller cabinet that houses parts ProRail has already contracted under its other ERTMS frameworks, including the signalling system and the axle counters, with at least 84 cabinets to follow development and acceptance.¹⁸ Once those places are filled, the product for each part of the system is chosen for years, and later contracts are let among the suppliers already selected.

Under the EU utilities directive, a framework agreement may not run for more than eight years, save in exceptional cases duly justified. It is an agreement with one or more suppliers that sets the terms for the contracts awarded during its term, and competition for those contracts may be reopened among the suppliers party to it as concluded. Under a qualification system, by contrast, the contracts it covers are awarded among the suppliers already qualified.³ For a utilities framework under the Procurement Act 2023, the limit is also eight years, unless the buyer considers that the nature of the work requires a longer term and gives its reasons in the tender or transparency notice; the limit does not apply to a private utility’s framework or an open framework.¹⁹ The Cabinet Office’s guidance adds that in most cases a framework does not commit the buyer to a call-off, though some may.²⁰

Under the EU directive, what differs for a firm outside is timing: a qualification system can be joined while it runs; a framework’s suppliers are those party to it when it is concluded. Even a place on a framework is not an order book: what a supplier can plan on is the volume the buyer commits to.

Under the EU rail interoperability directive, each component on which the interoperability of the rail system depends carries an EC declaration of conformity or suitability for use, signed by its manufacturer and backed by a notified body’s certificate where the specification requires one, and Member States may not repeat checks already carried out in that procedure.⁶ In the EU, whether a train and a line work together is checked separately, as ETCS System Compatibility and, for radio, Radio System Compatibility. For ETCS, the infrastructure manager defines the compatibility types for its network and, with the support of its ETCS suppliers, submits the definition of the checks for each type to the Agency, which publishes the list; the onboard supplier produces the statement for its equipment, and a notified body assesses the check reports. A check passed stays valid while the vehicle is not modified, and once the checks are published, national rules for ETCS compatibility testing are withdrawn.⁴

That work can be bought on its own: RFI’s award notice published on 18 May 2026 records a framework agreement signed on 8 May 2026 with the supplier of the trackside and onboard subsystems, to demonstrate their safe integration and the compatibility of the ETCS and radio systems. It was negotiated with that supplier alone under the Italian procurement code’s exception for exclusive rights, including intellectual property, which applies only where no reasonable substitute or alternative exists and the lack of competition is not the result of artificially narrowed parameters.^{21, 22} Compatibility work can depend on whoever holds the rights to the existing subsystems, so a new entrant’s price has to allow for the checks its product must pass on each network, and for who is able to carry them out.

In Great Britain, Network Rail adds a gate of its own: its plan of March 2024 provides for market application readiness work to support the appointed ETCS trackside suppliers through product development, to confirm that their solutions comply with the GB specifications for ETCS.¹⁰ Its year-three update plans the start of progressive testing of their products at national test facilities during 2026-27.¹¹

A European Commission page last modified on 26 September 2023 lists, among the causes of delay to ERTMS deployment, procurement procedures that led to delays, or even to projects being cancelled, because too few offers came in or offers exceeded the budget, and demanding requirements that lengthened tenders.²³

Network Rail’s year-three update, on its forecast as at February 2026, puts its ETCS spending for the control period that ends on 31 March 2029 at £994m, against £1,544m in its plan of March 2024, including signalling renewals at £257m against £545m and fleet modification at £535m against £812m, in cash prices.¹¹ On those figures, the money for ETCS signalling renewals is less than half what the 2024 plan set.

Source: the directives, regulations and Act named in the table, cited below.^{3, 4, 5, 6, 19}

ListingMinds, “ERTMS procurement: separate streams, gated by approvals”, 3 November 2026. https://www.listingminds.com/transport/guides/ertms-procurement