This year, the members of the Association of University Professorships of Railway Engineering (VUE) once again gathered for their traditional autumn meeting. The event was hosted by the Research Division for Rail-Based Transport Systems at TU Wien under the direction of Prof. Bernhard Rüger. The meeting provided professors and their research staff with an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas on current research projects and activities. A presentation by ÖBB Infrastruktur AG and a visit to the Vienna Climate Wind Tunnel rounded off the event with an engaging and insightful program.

Our colleague Alexandra Benz was awarded the Springorum Commemorative Coin at this year's RWTH Graduation Ceremony. Each year, the proRWTH Association honors outstanding graduates who have completed their studies with distinction. The award is presented to the top ten percent of graduates from each faculty.
We warmly congratulate her on this achievement!

In the Journal of Rail Transport Planning & Management, Tamme Emunds and Nils Nießen introduce an innovative approach for evaluating the performance of railway stations independently of timetables.

The model is based on a continuous-time Markov chain and, for the first time, enables a holistic analysis of entire railway stations-a valuable tool for infrastructure operators for planning and decision support.

The open-access publication in the special issue on RailDresden 2025 can be downloaded here.

Mr. Gonçalo Soares Roque passed his doctoral examination on August 04th, 2025. The title of his dissertation is: "Estimating the Environmental Impacts of Aircraft Operations around Airports: A novel Framework and its Application ". The Institute of Transport Science congratulates quite cordially!

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Nils Nießen, together with Pengling Wang, Yutao Ye, Andrea D'Ariano and Pieter Vansteenwegen, has published a new article entitled "Fare system selection and line planning for new suburban rail lines considering the supply-demand interactions" in the journal Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Research Part C: Emerging Technologies.
You are cordially invited to read or download the article. Access is free of charge until 23.08.2025.

As part of the "Planning and Operation of Airports" module, the CAST group exercise once again provided hands-on teaching this semester - with an exciting guest lecture by Tobias Pötter, Senior Aviation Consultant at the Airport Research Center (ARC) from Aachen.

In his lecture, Mr. Pötter offered key insights into terminal processes, passenger flows and capacity assessments using the CAST software and used real simulation projects from everyday working life to illustrate his explanations.

We would like to thank Mr. Pötter for the visit, the shared expertise and the valuable insights into his field of work.

As part of our Institute Internship: Railway Engineering we visited the Rurtalbahn in Düren on May 28, 2025. The trip to the construction site in Zülpich took place on a new hydrogen bus. Many thanks to the Rurtalbahn employees who made this visit possible.

Mrs. Wiebke Lenze passed her doctoral examination on Mai 26th, 2025. The title of her dissertation is: "Determination and Improvement of Quality in Rail Operations". The Institute of Transport Science congratulates quite cordially!