railML — XML data exchange standard for railways

Scope

Open XML-based data exchange format for the railway sector maintained by the railML.org consortium, with subschemas covering infrastructure, timetable, rolling stock and interlocking (including ETCS data). It lets infrastructure managers, railway undertakings and software suppliers exchange planning and asset data between tools without bespoke interfaces; the current release line is railML 3 (latest 3.3 SR1), with railML 2 still in productive use.

railML is an open, XML-based data exchange format for the railway sector, maintained by the railML.org consortium, with separate subschemas covering infrastructure data, timetable data, rolling stock data and interlocking data, including data specific to ETCS. It lets infrastructure managers, railway undertakings and software suppliers exchange planning and asset data between different software tools without each pair of systems needing a bespoke, one-off data interface, reducing integration cost across the many planning and operational IT systems used in the sector. The current mainstream release line is railML 3, with the latest release being version 3.3 Service Release 1, though the earlier railML 2 schema remains in active productive use across many existing systems and has not been fully superseded in practice despite railML 3's availability. Free registration on the railML.org site is required to download the detailed schema documentation, though the format itself is open and not subject to licensing fees. Software vendors implementing railway planning, timetabling or asset-management tools commonly support railML import and export as a standard interoperability feature expected by infrastructure manager and railway undertaking customers.