Technical unit in the railway industry
The technical unit in railways ( TE ) - also shortened technical unit - is a state treaty between European states. For the first time, it specified uniform minimum technical requirements for international, cross-border rail traffic .
The provisions of the technical unit in the railway system came into force in the German Reich on April 1, 1887.
history
The State Treaty was the result of negotiations that took place in Bern between 1882 and May 16, 1886. The following countries took part in the negotiations: the German Reich , France , Italy , Austria , Hungary and Switzerland . The international (French) name is: Conference Internationale pour l'unité technique des chemins de fer (UT) .
With the agreement, most of the continental European countries standardized the construction of tracks and wagons as well as the operational treatment of wagons. To this end, the acceding states enacted the convention as a national law. Other countries later joined the technical unit, such as B. Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Greece, Luxembourg, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Turkey and Yugoslavia (status: 1938).
The organizational form of the TE did not provide for a permanent body. It was not until 1922 that the Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer (UIC) was founded as an international railway association, which has since acted as a working body for the TE. About 160 railways belong to the UIC. Not all of these railways come from countries that are involved in the TE.
The new version from 1938, which came into force in the German Reich on June 30, 1939, was still valid in 1967. A revision text submitted in 1960, which not least took technical developments into account, was initially not adopted for political reasons, but was adopted in the German EBO from 1967.
The technical unit in the railway system has been revised several times, the most recently valid version was from 1938 (see Swiss source of the web links). The Swiss ordinance suggested some revision dates:
- 1909 (§ 27) ( For the cars built before 1909 ... )
- 1915 (§ 6) ( Wagons built before 1915 ... )
- 1939 (§ 8) ( ... for the cars built before 1939 ... ); (§ 9); (§ 12) ...
The regulations of the technical unit were adopted in Germany in the Railway Construction and Operating Regulations (BO) from 1904.
The minutes of June 3, 1999, z. B. came into force in Switzerland on July 1, 2006, stipulates: "With the entry into force of the annexes decided by the Technical Committee in accordance with Article 8 § 3 in all contracting states of the 1938 version of the International Agreement on Technical Unity in Railways, Signed in Bern on October 21, 1882, the above-mentioned convention shall cease to be in force. ”The above-mentioned annexes, which are laid down in the COTIF (Convention of 9 May 1980) of the intergovernmental organization for international rail traffic, replace the technical unit after 124 years.
Content
The focus of the regulations in the TE was on the dimensioning of railway wagons that are allowed to run in cross-border traffic on various national railways. Essential specifications are made above all for the track width , dimensions of the wheelsets , couplings , the wheelbase and other particularly affected parts, as well as the design and the designations to be attached. These basics inevitably also extended to the locomotives .
Up to the version of 1938, regulations for the loading of goods wagons and regulations for the transport of customs goods and the equipment of wagons for the transport of customs goods were drawn up.
A regulation of the TE had become known as the Bern area due to the location of the negotiations . It described the free space that the shunter between the railroad vehicles can rely on when coupling. In the TE itself, however, it is only described as a free space between the buffer discs [sic] and the head sill of the car (cf. German source of the web links, § 14).
Web links
- Swiss source: Ordinance on the technical unit in railways, of December 16, 1938
- German source for the publication of the original TE from 1887: Wikisource: Announcement Concerning the Technical Unit in Railways - Sources and Full Texts
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Alfons Thoma: From BO 1928 to EBO 1967 . In: The Federal Railroad . tape 41 , no. 13/14 , 1967, ISSN 0007-5876 , pp. 439–444 ( Drahtkupplung.de [PDF]).
- ^ A hundred years of German railways. 1935. p. 514.
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from June 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
