Models in the railway industry are often based on synchronous technologies such as Matlab or Scade. This is due to technical reasons, but because of its concepts the abstraction level of synchronous models are very low and very close to the implementation level. A serious gap is observed between the requirements described in natural textual language and the model which is basically an implementation. The increasing level of system complexity, combining communicating subsystems, calls for a more abstract model. This paper will first discuss why synchronous technologies have been used in this type of systems, then an experiment of using an asynchronous technologies on a real ERTMS case coming from SNCF is described, and finally the paper will conclude on how an asynchronous modeling technologies could make the link between the informal textual requirements and the implementation of the system.