Dr. Friedrich Krüger celebrates his 80th birthday

Friedrich Krüger has been an uninterrupted employee of STUVA e. V. since 1979 and, as head of the noise and vibration technology group from 1985, has played a key role in the association's success story. In 1989, he completed his doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin with a dissertation on the prediction of vibrations in railway tunnels.This topic has stayed with him to this day and has been the subject of countless research papers and expertises.Krüger is also the author of several specialised books on the subject of noise and vibration.His book ‘Noise and vibration protection in rail transport’, which is also recognised internationally as a standard work, has recently been extensively revised by him and his co-authors and has now been available in its third edition since December last year. His extensive expert knowledge continues to be in great demand worldwide, whether as a representative of the UITP in the European Commission's EU WG 6 ‘Railway Noise’ or in relevant national and international standardisation committees, where he also represents the interests of the Association of German Transport Companies. In March 2024, he was deservedly awarded the Rudolf Martin Certificate of Honour for his decades of work on the DIN/VDI Acoustics, Noise Reduction and Vibration Technology Standards Committee (NALS).Friedrich Krüger may have been retired for 15 years now, but that hasn't stopped him from cycling to the STUVA several times a week to pursue his life's work.However, he is now more selective: for health reasons, he now prefers to leave stressful foreign assignments such as the metro in Singapore, Light Rail Guadalajara in Mexico or the high-speed railway and metro in Taiwan to younger people, and he is also no longer available for so-called ‘in-situ measurements’ on railway lines, which mostly involved working through the night in the rain in the open air with complex measuring instruments.However, just a few days ago he held a seminar on noise and vibration protection in rail transport at the Technical Academy Esslingen (TAE).He has been organising these seminars for decades and it goes without saying that the next one is already in preparation.Dr Friedrich Krüger is simply a man of conviction and a scientist with all his soul! Everyone at the STUVA wishes him all the best for his birthday. Ad multos annos, dear Mr Krüger!