Abstract: The railway energy router(RER) is a crucial device in electrified railway systems, serving to improve power quality, recover braking energy, and utilize renewable energy. However, the conventional topology of RER requires transformers and inverters with doubled operational power capacity, leading to high costs and limiting industrial applicability. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a novel interphase bridging inverter structure-based railway energy router(IBI-RER), with its AC side bridging the α-phase and β-phase traction bus and its DC side integrating photovoltaic power and energy storage. First, the operation principle and energy transfer mode of this structure are analyzed. To address the active and reactive power coupling resulting from the transition of the inverter's traditional two-port mode to the IBI-RER's three-port mode, a hardware decoupling method with reactive power compensation devices is proposed. Additionally, to manage multi-directional energy flows among the three ports for the IBI-RER, a multi-layer optimal control strategy is introduced. Finally, based on the typical operation conditions and the measured data, a comparative analysis with the conventional RER is performed. The results show that, under the same function, the proposed IBI-RER has the advantages of simple structure and lower cost.