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The train control system is the railway system's brain, ensuring the train protection and the railway network's operating performance. This control system relies on the balise data received via near-field wireless communication to localize the train and update real-time operating conditions and constraints. The attackers can capture these data through their balise antenna and corrupt them through replay or false data injection attacks. This corrupted data can compromise train safety and jeopardize the entire train fleet operations.To overcome these attacks and to ensure the trustworthiness of balise and data integrity, this study proposes the permissioned blockchain-enabled two novel architectures for data transactions. Besides, each balise is equipped with a novel built-in blockchain cryptography algorithm to create its secret and public keys to provide the key integrity without needing third-party Certification Authority of conventional Public-Key Infrastructure based security systems. Each balise can create the unique signature using a 'nonce' signal sent by the train control system in the static architecture or using a self-generated 'k-once' secret key per train control system in dynamic architecture. Finally, the case studies are carried out to confirm the security sufficiency of the proposed architectures.

Rail operators around the world are adopting advanced control systems for railway signalling and train protection to improve their safety performance. In these re-signalling projects, the information about the already installed signals, point machines, track circuits etc. along the trackside infrastructure is essential for the configuration of advanced signalling equipment. The conventional information collection method which is based on unmanned aerial vehicles, helicopters etc. has the access limitations in terrains such as tunnels, hilly regions, river bridges, dense forests etc. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes the railway vehicular crowdsensing method in which one group of trains participates in this information collection and another group of trains confirms the validity of the collected information. For information exchange between the trains and centralized server, this study chooses the permissioned blockchain-based information transaction mechanism to ensure the trustworthiness. Furthermore, the railway markup language-based blockchain databases are included for information immutability, crowd information integration, and the automatic execution of data preparation signalling rules. Finally, the case studies are carried out to analyse the adequacy of the proposed combination of crowdsensing based secure trackside infrastructure information collection and validation, permissioned blockchain-enabled information transaction and blockchain databases in the proposed signalling data preparation process.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.