Rail Engineer - Issue 134 - December 2015

Engineerby rail engineers for rail engineers

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DECEMBER 2015 - ISSUE 134

JUNCTIONLANEHANGERAll change at

COASTING TO SUCCESS! Replacing the contact system on a heavily trafficked route while keeping services running.

BAFFLED BY BIM?Then our three articles, including the Rail BIM Summit review, should help you understand this crucial topic.

BATTERY-POWERED RECORDA Bombardier tram in Mannheim, Germany, runs for 41.6km without wires but on batteries alone.

@StobartRailLtd

Craig Jackson Project Manager e. [email protected]

Andrew Sumner Business Development and Stakeholder Managere. [email protected]

David Richardson Plant Managere. [email protected]

Gary Newton Contracts and Estimating Managere. [email protected]

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Project OverviewStobart Rail was approached by Network Rail to solve the drainage problem at Bamber Bridge. Isolated wet beds and blocked pipework were contributing to track circuit issues along with track formation faults.

The main issue at the site was with the quality of the spent ballast. Compaction, contamination and migration of ballast was restricting drainage resulting in the pooling of rain water. There were several catchpits along the section with collapsed pipes which were also contributing to the flooding.

The works included receiving plant and materials, installation of catchpits and a new 6ft drain, as well as the monitoring regime that was implemented to Network Rail’s guidelines. The drainage works were undertaken utilising a disused siding to gain access to the infrastructure.

The work was completed during a series of night possessions by installing 10 new catchpits for 257m at the north side of the level crossing. The new design provided an adequate solution to the drainage issues at the site.

The project delivery strategy was developed using in-house expertise and successfully completed with its objectives delivered safely, on time and within budget.

This project was completed in September 2015.

BAMBER BRIDGE DRAINAGE

The Bamber Bridge high priority drainage scheme was delivered by Stobart Rail under its Works Delivery Special Projects framework.

Bamber Bridge is located on the FHR4 line which connects West Coast main line with Blackburn.

Coasting to Success! 34Peter discovers trains coasting through worksites on the Great Eastern.

Spanish Solutions 36Delivering OLE projects using European experience.

Electrifying Denmark 38Denmark aims to have its entire network electrified by 2026.

PANtograph MONitoring 40Ricardo Rail’s new PanMon system should help reduce OLE failures.

Galvanizing the Industry 42How Manchester Galvanizing helps prevent corrosion problems.

The Future for Electrification Control 44Clive Kessell delves into Telent’s SCADA programme for Network Rail.

National Electrification Conference 50Peter Stanton sat in on the National Electrification Programme conference.

Setting New Standards 54The Role of Network Certification Body in electrification programmes.

A Year in Infrastructure 62Chris Parker was in Birmingham for the 2015 Bentley Systems conference.

Baffled by BIM? 64Join Chris Parker at the Rail BIM Summit to get up to speed.

Wheel Counting in Vienna 68David Shirres spends time with Frauscher at the Wheel Detection Forum.

Looking Ahead 74Stuart Marsh finds out how to reduce traffic accidents involving trams.

Battery-Powered Tram Record 78One of Bombardier’s trams ran for 41.6km with no wires at all.

How to Make an Entrance 80Next time you enter a station, consider the doors…

The Focus Moves to Bristol 82Collin Carr discovers there is more going on than just electrification.

Creating the New Timetable 86Grahame sits down with the team that created the latest train timetable.

Contents

We’re looking to highlight the latest projects and innovations in

Bridges & Tunnels Trackin the February issue of Rail Engineer.

Got a fantastic innovation? Working on a great project? Call Nigel on 01530 816 445 NOW!

22

28

58

West Midlands ResignallingAs Birmingham New Street opens, David Bickell looks at signalling in the area.

Mission BIMpossibleUsing RED (Railway Electrification Designer) to ensure BIM compliance.

Minor Railways and Monsters

100 Years: A Signalling Centenary

88

Rail Engineer • December 2015 3

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We planned our electrification feature some months ago, knowing that the GWEP would be under way, but not knowing that there would be a pause in other major schemes. Happily, the Government - ultimate holder of the purse strings - has un-paused the Transpennine and Midland projects, and so our extensive coverage of electrification this month is timely.

The pause was still in place when Peter Stanton attended the National Electrification conference and so a good deal of the debate centred around costs and efficiencies. It was a sobering thought that, currently, only Latvia, Denmark and Greece have a lower percentage of electrified system in Europe than the UK. Coincidentally, we have a piece on the scene in Denmark too this month!

Peter has looked at how the ageing and varied equipment on the Great Eastern has been renewed to improve reliability. Coasting is something that trains do very well under the right conditions. They can travel for miles without power - in this case with pantographs down. It seems the logical way to have your cake and eat it. Isolations and trains at the same time.

Up until recently, the only way to monitor a pantograph dynamically was to use kit that was located within the live 25kV equipment. Maintaining it was disruptive and expensive. Now there’s a new system that uses a range of high tech resources and is not too close to the wires.

Collin Carr’s piece on Bristol covers both electrification and metro railways. That’s not to say that Bristol will acquire a brand new system. It’s just that some existing routes will be consolidated into the re-opened Midland train shed.

Clive Kessell’s SCADA article has a heady mix of power, signal and communications engineering. This is not surprising as a new national SCADA control network will involve all these disciplines. The challenge will be to manage all the interfaces between what have been/still are separate departments.

There are not too many railway companies that can assert that they have been trading in railway signalling for 100 years or even trade under the same name. This is why provenance has to be spelt out at times. Clive has been to a certain Canadian company that was founded in 1937 manufacturing snowmobiles which is celebrating its signalling centenary.

David Bickell has been unravelling the intricacies of the West Midlands Resignalling scheme. This is a densely used area at the best of times, but things get really complicated when modern-day train patterns collide with the arrangements in Birmingham New Street.

Welcome to our new writer Mark Phillips who just happened to be in London, away from his native Exeter, when our colleagues in London Underground were replacing Hanger Lane junction. This location has just about every urban challenge imaginable. It’s heavily used, land locked, partly on an intersection bridge, and serves

both the District and Piccadilly lines. It took both novel materials handling and lateral thinking to ensure success.

Dodging deftly between the trams, Stuart Marsh looks at systems to help their drivers avoid the many perils of street running. Other vehicles intent on occupying the space reserved for trams can be detected and suitable speed reductions can follow, but the behaviour of humans is just too erratic for the sophisticated radar gizmos to fathom.

The public national timetable has two editions - one in May and one due out soon in December. Sounds straightforward, but don’t be fooled. The processes in the background are wildly complex and rely, to some part, on the human brain rather than swish computer programmes.

BIM - Building Information Modelling Level 2 is going to be a requirement for all government-funded contracts after April 2016. That’s not far away especially as quite a few folks have no idea what it’s all about.

Don’t worry (too much). Help is at hand. Rail Media has already run a BIM seminar in London. This was a sell-out, so there will be another one in January. Chris Parker reports and also went to a detailed BIM conference hosted by Bentley.

We’ve a piece by Ian Heague, Peter Evans and Jon Mercer who have developed a bespoke library of software BIM resources designed for Electrification works. As the deadline approaches it’s likely that more help will be at hand, but now is the time to get a handle on the subject in the first place!

We in the UK may not have to deal with pythons, but we have floods and lightning strikes. David Shirres outlines the catalogue of challenges for axle counters - which cope quite well in the circumstances.

Not only are the Minor Railways expanding their own networks, they also have their sights on running on the national network too. The recent workshop held by the Minor Railways section of the IRSE was largely taken up with case studies showing that there’s a whole new world to have a go at. Like the ancient navigators, they’re undaunted by what’s over the border.

Although you’ll receive this edition of Rail Engineer in early December, this will be my last chance to wish you all a very happy Christmas and an uplifting Level 2 New Year on behalf of all the production team here at Rail Media.

Serious Hard Wiring

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In the UK, we are seeing trams taking passenger connectivity to new levels, bringing manifold benefits to the environment, the economy and local communities. Passengers seem to agree, with nearly 240 million passenger journeys in 2015 on Britain’s eight light rail systems.

Since falling out of favour in the receding years of the 1900s, recent governments have backed light rail, especially trams, to provide better, smarter municipal transportation at a lower cost per mile, whilst also improving the environment.

Light rail, trams and other rapid transit systems, even trolleybuses, are a key part of an overall strategy to get people out of their cars, to reduce congestion and emissions in our major conurbations. Croydon Tramlink, for example, affected a modal shift from cars of 20 per cent.

The fact that not one tramway system in the UK looks the same is indicative of a mode of transport that can be tailored to fit the specific needs of a community and provide a sensible solution for addressing public transport ambitions. Crucial for local authorities looking to make huge benefits to their public transport networks without making huge dents to their coffers.

The Docklands Light Railway, for instance, has grown into an essential piece of east London’s infrastructure, connecting the City with Canary Wharf and providing connections to the tube network and London City Airport, the Olympic Park and High Speed 1.

Although it was in New York where the first tramway appeared in 1832, Europe now enjoys the densest implementation of light rail. From Germany’s tried and tested U-Bahn system, and the five-line Grenoble tramway, to the Edinburgh Tramway, on which WSP/Parsons Brinckerhoff was the designer.

This latter example shows how trams can play a massive part in inter-connecting multi-modality, in this case linking mainline rail with Edinburgh Airport and the city centre. Again, the passengers seem to agree, with nearly five million using it in its first year.

However, rail technology doesn’t stand still for long and communities that are considering new tram systems as part of their public transport solutions should look beyond the well-worn systems for their inspiration.

Indeed, one of the largest advantages of these lighter, cheaper modes of transportation is their flexibility to be modified for the unique applications of each new system.

Equally, modern braking systems feature multiple routes to failure, therefore removing the need for trams to be parked on level ground when unattended. These sorts of considerations, although seemingly small, demonstrate that tram technology is constantly looking to innovate and improve, forcing promoters to keep their eyes on the horizon.

Qatar is upping the stakes further with its Education City tram, built primarily to transport students. Its trams are advancing the traction power system through the use of hybrid-storage capacitors coupled with batteries

that provide a catenary-free operation. Its batteries can also be recharged by overhead electrical conductor rails found at any one of the 24 stations/stops via an electrical pick up found on top of the tram (the pantograph).

This innovative approach allows the tram to operate without the risk of catenary wire strikes by vehicles on roads, and also allows partial recharge of the energy storage system whilst stationary in the tram stops. This tram system comes replete with features to allow its electrical equipment and its passengers to cope with the searing, 50+ degrees heat and intense sunlight. The low-floor rolling stock even includes natural colours that will promote calm among its passengers.

The move away from catenary power, as the delivery path for our electric trams, to internal rechargeable hybrid-capacitors and batteries is an area of technology that is the focus of great innovation and improvement.

It is largely inspired by naval, submarine technology, where battery and associated recharge technology continues to be improved, especially regarding power-to-weight ratios. Indeed, the batteries on Qatar’s state-of-the-art 11.5km network will store and re-use the energy that is generated as the tram brakes.

The kinetic energy recovery system (KERS) that adds further green credentials to light rail owes a lot to Formula 1, where it has seen much development.

Looking further afield, our global vision for ‘smart cities’ has transport at its heart. Imagine a smart transport system where commuters are connected to real-time transport information and purchase tickets as they travel, without having to make a physical transaction or queue for tickets.

The powerlines that drive trams are ideal conduits through which to stream large bandwidths of data, which will help cities realise the potential of the ‘internet of things’.

Passenger information systems that are tuned in to traffic and incident management systems in real time are better able to take evasive action and avoid creating congestion spots and exacerbate pinch points.

Trams are getting faster, better and cheaper. As we find ever more sophisticated and innovative solutions to meet the pressing need for smarter public transport solutions, it is not hard to imagine that the golden era of the tram may still be to come.

Sherman Havens is rail technical director at WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff.

Tram: old world idea with futuristic potential

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The Enterprise service operates eight services in each direction between Belfast and Dublin, Monday to Saturday and five journeys in each direction on Sundays. It offers a high quality, value for money service which is convenient, comfortable and a safe travel option.

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of the passenger information system, a new electronic passenger reservation system and CCTV.

The refurbishment programme has been financed through the European Union’s INTERREG IVA Programme, which is managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB) with support from the Department for Regional Development and the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport (DTTAS) in Ireland. Refurbishment of all remaining Enterprise trains is scheduled for completion by the end of 2015.

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Christmas is coming

As the nation carves its Christmas turkey, the railway’s ‘orange army’ will be out in force to take advantage of the longer closures that can be arranged over the holiday period.

Over 20,000 Network Rail workers will be working on almost 500 individual improvement projects, including new station facilities, longer platforms, extra tracks, new junctions and thousands of pieces of new, more reliable equipment. All this will be installed and delivered in a £150 million investment programme that will begin late on Christmas Eve once the last trains have run.

Commenting on the problems caused by two project overruns last year, chief executive Mark Carne said: “Since last Christmas, we have completely reviewed and revised how we plan and manage major upgrades. The new measures we have put in place have seen us already deliver over £250 million of improvements over four bank holiday weekends on time, including

the single biggest track replacement project ever at Bathampton in August.

“We are continuing to review all the risks associated with our improvement programme this Christmas to make sure that our plans are as robust as possible and we deliver improvements for passengers on time.”

Significant work being carried out this Christmas includes work at London Bridge station and bringing the new viaduct over Borough Market into service as part of the continuing Thameslink programme, improvements for Crossrail to the east and west of London, replacing a major junction on the Brighton main line at Purley and a 17-day closure to carry out upgrades to platforms, track and signaling in Lincolnshire.

NEWSNEWSRail Engineer • December 201510

NEWS

The digital age is well and truly established on Britain’s railways. Over the past four years, Network Rail has rolled out more than 25,000 iOS devices - both iPad and iPhone - to its workforce, with more than 18,000 of these

across its frontline maintenance, operations, and safety and engineering teams.

Smartphone and tablet technology helps staff to predict, prevent and respond to incidents on the railway network. The movement towards a paperless railway has been aided by the development of more than

60 unique mobile apps created in-house by Network Rail. The apps help provide staff with the latest technical data, GPS locations, and streamlined reporting.

Gone forever are the cumbersome

reference books, ambiguously located trouble spots, and rain-soaked paperwork that slowed the repair process. As well as making life easier for staff, it is also estimated that the use of modern technology will help realise over £700 million worth of efficiencies over the next ten years.

Philip Entwistle, a Network Rail maintenance team leader based in

Rugby, commented: “In the old days, you tended to leave stuff behind as you didn’t want to carry reams of paperwork, folders and manuals - now that’s all accessible via our iPhone or iPad. Nothing gets lost that way, it’s a lot safer.”

Users can also access Rail Engineer on iPad and iPhone, giving them access to their favourite magazine during rest periods.

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A welcome addition to the list of participants is Crossrail, the Transport for London body responsible for creating the capital’s new railway. It is also one of Infrarail’s supporting organisations. With work in full swing ahead of the line’s phased opening from 2018, Crossrail’s presence will provide attendees with plenty of opportunities to learn more about this major addition to London’s transport network.

Also making its Infrarail debut, both with a stand and as part the On Track Display, will be rail flaw-detection specialist Sperry Rail International. Recently, the firm introduced an award-winning patented innovation for measuring Rolling Contact Fatigue using eddy current technology.

Plans for the show’s supporting events are gaining tempo too. Included in these will be Rail Mentor seminars aimed at assisting SMEs to gain access to the industry’s supply chain.

Exhibition manager Kirsten Whitehouse said: “To enable these to take place during Infrarail, we are now working closely with the Rail Alliance which, in turn, is collaborating with the Rail Supply Group to plan the seminars. Expect more details soon.”

Infrarail 2016 takes place at ExCeL London from 12 to 14 April. Entry will be free for pre-registered visitors, with online registration opening in the months leading up to the show. Attendees will also have access to CITE 2016 - the Civil Infrastructure & Technology Exhibition, which will feature many of the civils products and services needed for rail projects, as well as for highways, utilities and communications networks.

For more information on Infrarail 2016 including the latest exhibitor list visit www.infrarail.com, with details of CITE 2016 available at www.cite-uk.com.

Infrarail exhibitors pass the 100 mark

New stand reservations continue to flow in for Infrarail 2016, which is shaping up to be another great event. By mid-November, the number of companies taking part in next April’s rail infrastructure showcase had risen to over 100. And of those, around 30 will be exhibiting at Infrarail for the first time.

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Since Bombardier was awarded the contract to supply Crossrail’s 66 nine-car trains, the company has worked with TfL and designer Barber & Osgerby to develop the definitive style for both their interior and exterior.

The new Aventra Class 345 trains have been designed and are being built by Bombardier Transportation’s factory in Derby where they are supporting 760 jobs and 80 apprenticeships. Each train will provide space for 1,500 customers in fully interconnected, walk-through carriages. At over 200 metres in length, they are over one and a half times longer than the longest Tube train.

Large, clear areas around the doors will allow quicker and easier

boarding and alighting. A mixture of metro-style and bay seating will be available through the train, which will be driver-operated with on-train customer information systems delivering real-time travel information, allowing customers to plan their onward journeys whilst onboard.

The first trains to operate on the Liverpool Street to Shenfield part of the Crossrail route from May 2017 will initially use shorter seven-carriage versions of the new trains. All subsequent trains will be the full-length, nine-car version, to be first introduced between Heathrow and Paddington from May 2018. All the trains will be converted to nine carriages by the end of 2019.


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As Network Rail modernises and enhances its key stations, the improvement in its retail offering is pulling people in, making the station a destination in its own right rather than just a transport interchange.

In just three months earlier this year, July to September, the same number of people visited retailers at stations as the entire population of the country - 63 million.

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Sales results at three London stations were the highest for the quarter with Cannon Street

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(44.55%), Paddington (18.83%) and London Bridge (17.24%) recording the highest growth across Network Rail’s estate. Outside of London, Network Rail’s newest managed stations, Reading and Bristol, performed strongly with increased sales of 9.47% and 11.76% respectively.

Hamish Kiernan, Network Rail’s

director of retail, said: “Our goal is to enhance the overall passenger experience and continue to cater to the demands of the travelling public as well as the thousands of people who live and work near our stations. Our success in boosting retail sales at our stations is helping generate additional profit to re-invest in our growing railway.”

15Rail Engineer • December 2015

HANGERLANEAll change at

MARK PHILLIPS


JUNCTIONHANGERLANE17Rail Engineer • December 2015

Hanger Lane Junction on the Piccadilly and District lines of London Underground was last completely renewed in 1984. Thirty years later, it was due for renewal and modernisation. Considering the volume of

traffic over it, the junction had performed well.

This junction - curiously named as it is actually quite some way distant from Hanger Lane itself - provides the facility for District line trains to Ealing Broadway to branch off from the Piccadilly line between Acton Town and Uxbridge. It is a conventional double junction.

However, an unsatisfactory feature of its location is that part of the switch area lies on the major truss bridge carrying the Underground lines over the Network Rail Great Western lines. This has meant that differential support conditions existed between the part of the junction on the bridge and that on the embankment formation, aggravating difficulties for maintenance of good geometry and contributing to frequent points failures.

While renewing the junction, London Underground took the opportunity to improve the support conditions by laying geotextile membranes and regularising the depth of the new ballast as far as possible. The overall design of the new layout allows a 5mph speed increase through the junction and incorporates new switch power units compatible with the forthcoming ‘Endstate’ resignalling and modernisation project. The work has also increased capacity to 16 trains per hour into and out of Ealing Broadway.

No possessionAll these improvements looked

good, but the estimated 76-hour possession to renew the double junction would not be available. Therefore, a novel possession strategy was devised, one that would allow the desired renewal to be done very efficiently and with very little disruption to the normally available weekday services. Inevitably there would be some effect on weekend services.

The work was carried out by Track Partnership, a strategic alliance between London Underground and Balfour Beatty. Owen Stratford, engineering manager for Balfour

Beatty, and Louise Allaker, assistant project manager for London Underground, explained that it had been decided to adopt a modular approach to the junction renewal.

By designing the switch and crossing (S & C) layout so that it could be prefabricated in modular units, it became possible to use the more readily available 52-hour closures.

With this approach, the westbound modules could be installed independently on the first weekend, and the eastbound on the second with the junction only being coupled up throughout at that stage. The works were carried out between Saturday 24 October and Sunday 1 November, using two weekend 52-hour possessions along with a week long closure of the District line between the junction and Ealing Broadway. The only station to lose


its service during the week was Chiswick Park, Central line services being available from Ealing Broadway.

Two prior 52-hour closures of the District line had been taken earlier in the year to renew 450 metres of the eastbound and 525 metres of the westbound plain line in preparation for the junction renewal. These works included a significant realignment, five-metre track slews, to prepare for a revised junction alignment.

The timing of the actual double junction renewal work during the October half-term week was selected for two reasons. Firstly, the passenger numbers are slightly lower overall and so there would be less disruption to the travelling public. The second reason was that it had been negotiated for the 14 major S&C modules to be stockpiled in the grounds of the Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls, just adjacent to the northern side of the railway embankment. From there they were readily moveable by road-mobile telescopic crane to their installed position, but it was desirable that this should happen whilst the school was on holiday.

One weekend at a timeOn the first weekend, the westbound part

of the junction was removed, reballasted and renewed using 10 prefabricated modules. The new switch on the westbound and the old switch on the eastbound were secured for through running by Piccadilly line trains from Monday to Friday. On the second weekend, the reballasting and renewal of the eastbound part was completed with the installation of the remaining four modules.

Starting on Saturday 24 October, after removal of the old trackwork and ballast on the westbound portion of the junction, new geotextile membranes - TriAxial Geogrid TX190L from Tensar and Geofabrics’ Tracktex - were

laid. The exposed part of the Network Rail bridge was re-waterproofed with Wolfin and Tiflex membrane laid. Reballasting was completed by 01:00 on Sunday morning.

Sequentially with this, the new switch and crossing modules were progressively lifted in between 20:30 Saturday and 04:30 Sunday. Two 250-tonne cranes supplied by Ainscough lifted the 10 modules from their storage positions in the school compound.

At the planning stage, consideration had been given to the use of a single 500 tonne crane. However, accessing this crane to site through the school would have required the removal and reinstatement of some lighting columns and other school infrastructure. So, although no tandem lifts were needed, the two smaller cranes were there because of lifting radii.

Within the confined space available, it was not possible to stack all the modules in positions such that they could be transferred from their

stored locations to their installed track locations from only one crane position.

Final lining and levelling, welding, top ballasting and tamping was completed by 17:10 Sunday. Conductor rail replacement and point fitting work was all carried out by 18:00 with the signalling work and testing finished by 02:30 Monday morning.

Between Monday and Friday, with the spur of the District line closed, the opportunity was taken to carry out significant additional work between the junction and Ealing Broadway. Over 100 metres of plain line was renewed on each of the eastbound and westbound lines.

Redundant sidings were removed and the track layout at Ealing Broadway was simplified, also in readiness for Endstate. A ‘spring toggle’ switch unit at Ealing Broadway was removed and replaced with a like-for-like fully-powered version using electro-pneumatic points operating equipment in the four-foot.


Part twoThe second main possession weekend tackled the switch

and crossing renewal work on the eastbound line with a similar sequence of operations as the previous weekend’s work. In this case, it comprised four S&C modules only. The last module was in place by 20:15 on Saturday 31 October and the overall works were complete by the very early hours of Monday morning.

The 14 switch and crossing modules had been trial erected by Progress Rail at its Beeston depot, (Issue 132 October) with the timing of the build being planned to allow the modules to be delivered to the school compound within the school half-term holidays. The design of the individual units had to be such that the 10 modules installed on the first weekend could be placed in their final positions whilst leaving the eastbound trackwork unaffected. All ‘through’ concrete bearers, those that support both westbound and eastbound lines as one structural unit, had to effectively consist of two sections longitudinally. For each of these through bearers, the junction between the two sections falls either within the four-foot or the six-foot, depending on its location within the layout.

After accurate positioning, lining and levelling of the eastbound modules, they were ready for making good with the previously installed westbound modules. All the through bearers were coupled up by the installation of modular tie-plates. Four coach screws fastened into the end of each bearer secure these tie-plates, the coach screws being torque loaded at 340Nm into the pre-formed housings. The dimensional accuracy of the location of these housings is of paramount importance.

Whilst this technique and methodology has been previously used on Network Rail layouts, it is believed that this project is the first to have used it for a double junction on London Underground. The use of modular tie plates on the Underground infrastructure gives rise to an additional complication, in that the fourth-rail negative electrification equipment in the four-foot has to pass over them and

there is limited electrical clearance. To overcome this challenge, the tie plate design was developed to include the mounting of a specially designed insulator pot and Brecknell Willis No.6 conductor rail was installed. This has a shallow section and, for use in this application, incorporates an additional foot shroud that maintains the required 75mm electrical clearance.

Flashing lightsSome noteworthy safety features are worthy of

comment. During the lifting and placement of the switch and crossing modules an ‘exclusion zone’ was established. Once the bottom ballast had been accurately profiled and compacted and was ready for receipt of the modules, the whole area of those operations was cordoned off with red/white boundary tape. Whilst the modules were being lifted, the only personnel permitted within the zone were crane staff - slingers and supervisor - and those Track Partnership staff responsible for positioning the modules.

A comment overheard from someone watching from outside the exclusion zone was: “It looks like we’ve got a UFO up there”. This was a reference to the flashing red ‘trolley lights’ strapped onto the panels at several places. These bright LED lights, flashing once every one or two seconds, and normally used on rail trolleys, were a very effective warning device to maintain awareness of the moving loads. Apparently, the batteries can have a life of up to two months.

This simple precaution was in popular use elsewhere to warn of hazards. For example, the LEDs had been attached to a kerb on the walking route between the site briefing office and the site entrance, undoubtedly preventing likely trips that would otherwise have occurred.

Project cost was £3.2million for the double junction renewal and the District line plain line renewals.

The unusual sight of large sections of permanent way stacked neatly in the grounds of a school was intriguing. However, Rail Engineer suspects that the school is relieved to have their premises back for their exclusive use and that London Underground is delighted with its brand new junction, having promised passengers a noticeably more comfortable ride.


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Opened in September, the imposing Birmingham New Street station, with its iconic new atrium atop the huge new concourse, has at last created space for the 175,000 passengers and visitors who pass through the station every day, up from 60,000 passengers a day that

the previous 1960s rebuild was designed to accommodate.

However, down at platform level, the 1960s track layout and signalling is still in service. It was designed to cater for 650 trains a day but this has since risen to 1,200. Remarkably, this increase in train movements has been accommodated effectively with very little change to the track and signalling infrastructure.

That’s all about to change, and Rail Engineer was invited by Richard Dugdale, Network Rail’s sponsor for infrastructure renewal projects, to hear about the huge programme to renew all signalling in the West Midlands area.

Signalling programme Network Rail’s London North West (South)

Route Infrastructure Projects (Signalling) team, led by Elgan Davis, has been managing the renewal of the signalling infrastructure. The programme started with Coventry PSB area in 2007 and will be almost complete when New Street station is resignalled in December 2018. That just leaves the recontrol of Cross-City North

(Aston NX panel), which has been postponed to CP6 (after 1 April 2019).

Siemens is the framework contractor for West Midlands signalling renewals and is the preferred contractor. Wolverhampton PSB resignalling was tendered before the signalling framework was in place and was won by Atkins, which sub-contracted Siemens for the signalling data build. At the time, Atkins didn’t have an interlocking/workstation product but it is understood that they are coming to market with product in partnership with GETS (now acquired by Alstom).

Early GRIP stage signalling design work is being undertaken by Network Rail’s in-house Signal Design Group (SDG). Andy Reynolds from this team was on hand to explain the various design issues described below.

WMSC takeover The new signalling is being controlled from

the WMSC (West Midlands Signalling Centre) at Saltley, originally built for the aborted West

Coast Passenger Upgrade 2 (PUG2) signalling for 140mph, but now accommodating West Midlands area signalling in the high security building.

The early 1960s era of West Coast Electrification heralded a period of unprecedented infrastructure modernisation in the West Midlands. From the signalling perspective, new power signal boxes were provided at the following locations with dates of the original commissioning and subsequent resignalling to WMSC: Coventry (1962-2007), Bescot (1965-2013), Wolverhampton (1965-2015), Walsall (1965-2013), Saltley (1969-still open for residual area: cross-city south) and Birmingham New Street (1966-still fully operational).

In addition, the programme includes the resignalling of the remaining mechanical signal boxes which were left in place when the power boxes were commissioned - in the Oxley, Cannock, Wilmcote and Banbury areas. Recontrol of existing relay interlockings built more recently at Birmingham Snow Hill, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Madely Jn, and recontrol of existing SSI interlockings on routes serving Stourbridge, Longbridge and Lichfield, also form part of the project.

DAVID BICKELL

22 Rail Engineer • December 2015

New Street power boxBirmingham New Street Power Signal Box, a

Grade II listed building commissioned in 1966, continues to stand sentinel, overlooking the west end station throat. The extensive area of control stretches from Hampton-in-Arden in the east to Tipton in the west and embraces parts of New Street-avoiding ‘Grand Junction’ lines and the cross city route.

The intensity of train movements is such that working the NX panel is a challenging job for signallers. There is no Automatic Route Setting (ARS) or Train Operated Route Release (TORR), all routes having to be set up by pressing buttons and cancelled behind each train by pulling up the entrance button.

Capacity remains a thorny problem. Increasing the number of platforms and approach tracks in the subterranean environment would be extremely challenging and costly. Even if this was physically possible, conflicting movements at the east and west throats would limit the throughput of trains. The opening of HS2, and a possible Bordesley chord to divert some New Street services into Moor Street, will provide much needed relief.

Renewing New Street signallingPlans are well advanced for the replacement of

New Street box on a mainly like-for-like basis with, generally, all-new signalling. The original Westpac MkI & MkIIIB geographical relay interlockings will be replaced by Siemens Trackguard Westlock. Proof House Junction was resignalled in 2000 with two SSIs, and this is planned as a ‘relock’ using a single Westlock interlocking, the outdoor signalling infrastructure in this area remaining as it is now. The former New Street area will be controlled by three Siemens Westcad workstations.

Clamp locks are the preferred point operating mechanism for LNW(S). However, points will retain their existing mechanisms unless in need of renewal. Indeed, the remaining original electro-pneumatic points on the patch are being replaced with clamp locks as a separate exercise by Network Rail’s in-house works delivery teams prior to resignalling.

Where new S&C is provided, such as at Galton Junction where a track remodelling project is programmed to precede resignalling, ‘in-bearer’ clamp locks are to be installed. No changes are planned for S&C in the New Street station area as each end of the station was the subject of a big track-relaying project a few years ago.

New Street moves to WMSCFirst to go, in November 2016, will be the

route towards Bromsgrove as part of the wider Cross City South project. Four major New Street phases are planned to take place between December 2017 and December 2018. » Phase 1: Cross-City South - Nov 2016; » Phase 4: Stour Valley (Soho to Tipton) - Dec

2017, with a track remodelling at Galton Jn over Easter 2016;

» Phase 5: Grand Junction lines (Stechford to Hamstead) - Dec 2017;

» Phase 6: Birmingham International (Hampton-in-Arden to Proof House) - May 2018;

» Phase 7: Birmingham New Street Station area. The box will then close - Dec 2018.

Whilst the Dec 2017 date is secured, the later dates are, at this time, still to be agreed, with Euston HS2 enabling works competing for resources and access availability in the December 2018 timeslot. Phase 7 will mark completion of a programme of the systematic transfer of signalling to WMSC with the exception of Aston NX panel for which, at time of writing, no date has been set for recontrol.

West MidlandsResignalling


Non-compliant layout1960s railway engineers were faced with shoehorning

the then-new modern station into the cramped site bequeathed by our Victorian predecessors. They crammed in as much track and point work and as many platforms as possible, but this inevitably forced some compromises in the signalling scheme plan.

Platform ‘starting’ signals have to be as close as possible to the end of the platforms to maximise standing room, yet immediately beyond the signals are points. When a route is set into a platform and up to the signal at the exit end, an ‘overlap’ would normally be set. The length of an overlap is specified in Railway Group Standards as 45 metres, given the blanket line speed of 10mph. Such overlaps, if provided, would lock points for 45 metres beyond the signal until such time as the incoming train has come to a stand, thereby preventing any other movements taking place using the said points.

Such operational restrictions, which would have a severe impact on capacity and hence the timetable, were deemed unacceptable in the 1960s signal design in which no overlaps were provided in the station area. There are also some compromises with regard to gauge clearances within the station throats. If this concept was

to be perpetuated in the forthcoming resignalling, a much more rigorous justification would be required to obtain the necessary derogation.

The inherent lack of space at New Street also causes problems mid-platform. Back-to-back mid-platform signals are used to separate the platforms into two separate block sections, although permissive movements (more than one train occupying a block section) are sometimes necessary for which position light signals are provided. Once again, no overlaps are provided for the mid-platform signals, nor is there a separate train detection section between the signals. In 1966, trains consisted of locomotive-hauled rakes, or first generation DMUs. Today, multiple units are the order of the day and many DMUs consist of 23-metre length vehicles which are a little longer than their predecessors. In order to suit present day and foreseeable train configurations, a major exercise had to be undertaken to determine the optimum position for the mid-platform signals.

Another issue with the existing mid-platform signals is that an incoming train proceeding through to the far end of the platform may stop with its rear overhanging the mid-platform signal even though it has cleared the rear platform detection section. A second train could be signalled in on a single yellow only to be confronted by the tail-lights of the first train a metre or so before reaching the signal post of the red signal protecting the train ahead.

To address these difficult issues, Network Rail brought in Ricardo Rail (formerly Lloyd’s Register Rail) to carry out in-depth risk assessments. Operational risks to be considered include platform-train interface issues, dispatch errors, potential for overrun and SPADs, permissive working, slow speed collisions and trains not fully ‘at platform’.

Charles Stewart of Ricardo Rail elucidated the process to Rail Engineer. Under UK law, there is an obligation to show that the risk is tolerable and as low as reasonably practicable. Ordinarily, this can be substantially demonstrated by compliance with Railway Group and Network Rail standards, but the uniqueness of the arrangements at New Street precludes this approach.

Attempts to make the layout compliant didn’t progress beyond the first draft of the signal plan. Initial designs produced by SDG demonstrated that a fully-compliant

The previous redevelopment of Birmingham New Street in the 1960s.

Birmingham New Street NX panel.


solution, by putting in overlaps and/or moving signals and reducing standing room, would make the station unusable.

Historic data provides evidence that the existing arrangement has achieved an acceptable level of safety, but historic data is only an indication of what has happened and not necessarily what might happen in the future. Consequently, it cannot be assumed that a like-for-like change will be acceptably safe, and adoption of such a change would not show consideration of reasonable opportunity for improvement.

Hence the approach adopted was to consider what safety improvements were practicable to implement, taking into consideration the trade-off between safety and operability.

For example, to consider risk associated with signal overrun, RSK was employed to undertake assessments using the RSSB’s Signal Overrun Assessment Tool (SORAT) to obtain a risk score for every signal, the scores being added up to give an overall score. This exercise, using a standardised timetable, was run three times, once for the existing layout and twice for the new. The initial assessment for the new was undertaken based on SDG’s proposed design and the second based on a revised design taking into account TOC requirements for operational and stabling standage.

On balance, the new layout is lower risk than the existing one and the operational benefit from the final layout has been assessed to outweigh the slight increase in risk from the proposed design. Factors helping to improve the score include the removal of intermediate ground signals (no

longer required for engine run-rounds) and a reduction in permissive working due to the mid-platform signals being repositioned to take account of today’s train length configuration, with a larger gap between.

TPWS (Train Protection and Warning System) is, of course, a feature of the station and effectiveness of the Train Stop loops (TSS) is compromised by lack of overlaps. A distance of 17 metres is required to bring a train to a stand with a TSS activation, so this has been factored into the risk assessments.

Platforms 11 and 12, which currently don’t have mid-platform signals, will have them installed on the grounds of consistency and operational flexibility.

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New Street power signal box is Grade II listed.


Workstations and interlockingsAll workstations are Invensys/Siemens Rail Automation

Westcad. Interlockings are SSI (earlier schemes) and Siemens Trackguard Westlock. Westlock is compatible with SSI but has a much greater interlocking capacity, obviating the need for complex horizontal and vertical interlocking boundaries of adjacent interlockings. Standard SSI data links and long line links are provided as appropriate, linking to Data Link Modules (DLMs) and Track Function Modules (TFMs).

However, with Phase 6 of New Street, the plan is to move to object controllers to replace TFMs. These have the benefit of saving space (most useful at New Street where there is limited room for equipment in the confines of the station) and also interfacing directly with axle counter systems, obviating the need for interface relays and thus reducing the number of potential failure points. Object controllers are currently being trialled at Crewe.

‘Plug and Play’ was adopted for connecting external equipment in the Wolverhampton station area. This involved a significant additional design effort in determining cable lengths but this technique was a ‘one-off’ in the overall programme.

Automatic Route Setting (ARS) is not provided at any of the existing workstations at WMSC. Mick Brook, operations specialist, explained that the project is keen to get ARS in for Phase 6 (Proof House) and possibly Phase 7 (station area), to address signallers workload / workstation configuration issues. However, a problem flagged up is that TORR (a pre-requisite for ARS), will not work in the station area. The reason for this is that TORR, as currently specified, requires three changes of state (occupied/clear) of two or three track circuits, which is not possible with the mid-platform signals that have no separate overlap. However, this requirement was specified to cover ‘blipping’ track circuits. As axle counters don’t suffer from this phenomenon, it may be possible to find a safe alternative way of initiating route release under TORR.

LED signalsLightweight LED signals are used as standard, with the

supplier selected by the signalling contractor. Dorman has been the main source of supply for the schemes for which Siemens was contractor, although Variable Message Signs (VMS) signals have been installed in the Wolverhampton area.

When originally installed, a special design of compact searchlight signal, packaged within an inverted triangular box, was used on the platforms owing to restricted sighting within the low ceiling of station. However, these signals became difficult to maintain with their internal moving spectacles and comparatively poor level of brightness, and they have all been replaced over time with standard signal heads, in many cases mounted horizontally. With the potential advantage of today’s lightweight LED signals, the route asset manager has been developing a mid-platform signal to solve the various issues.

Incidentally, one important feature worth mentioning is the provision of additional and more evenly spaced signals, giving a standard three-minute headway between Euston and Wolverhampton with four-aspect signalling. Drivers have remarked on the improved sequence on the Wolverhampton portion of route already resignalled.

WMSC Westlock interlocking.

Inside the West Midlands Signalling Centre.


Train detectionAxle counters are the preferred method of train detection.

For the New Street station area, though, some key issues need to be resolved - finding space to mount the heads on the complex point work and avoiding the susceptibility of ‘wheel rock’. The latter phenomenon occurs when a wheel becomes stationary over a head, potentially giving rise to a mis-count and false ‘occupied’ status.

To avoid operational delays caused by a failed section, Thales is running a trial at Coventry involving the use of a ‘supervisory’ section. For example, for three sections A, B and C, there would be a supervisory section A-C which provides an overall monitor such that, if there is a disturbance in the middle, it will do an automatic reset as long as the supervisory section is unchanged.

A further disadvantage of axle counters is that heads may need to be removed for track work. However, lower profile models such as the Thales type ‘K’ may reduce the need to remove the heads for all but intrusive work such as relaying.

For the forthcoming Bromsgrove resignalling, it was intended to use central evaluation of axle counters. That is to say, the Ethernet outputs from Thales type ‘K’ axle counter trackside units are fed into the Fixed Telecommunications Network (FTN) and received at WMSC where the evaluator units are to be based. This reduces the number of Relocatable Equipment Rooms (REBs) required outdoors and allows the technician to fault and test the equipment without leaving the signalling centre.

However, there are remote AHBs (automatic half-barrier level crossings) triggered by axle counter sections, and it was found that critical timings may not be achieved because of the timing cycles and processing time needed in passing the data to WMSC and back out to the AHBs. An alternative strategy has been devised for these crossings, which provides for the grouping of evaluators in REBs located at the AHBs.

Centralising all West Midlands signalling at Saltley, together with Network Rail’s control staff, is proving to be a very successful arrangement. However, the intention to recontrol the signalling to the recently opened Rail Operating Centre (ROC) at Rugby is not an early priority. A description of the latter will appear in a forthcoming issue of Rail Engineer.

Thanks to Richard Dugdale, Andy Reynolds, Jaspall Devsi, Mick Brook, James Knapp and Elgan Davis of Network Rail, and Charles Stewart of Ricardo Rail, for their help in preparing this article.

A control station at the WMSC.


The electric interlocking at Olskroken, Sweden, installed in 1940, was replaced with an Ericsson computer-based interlocking in 1982.


A signalling centenary

CLIVE KESSELL

Many of today’s big railway signalling companies can trace their origins back

for decades, some almost to the time when railways first became commercial operations. Almost none still carry their original name because acquisitions, mergers and expansion into other disciplines have altered the structure of the companies.

First Electronic Centralised Traffic Control (ECTC) in Europe, delivered to Stockholm Central, Sweden, 1971.


The technology of signalling has advanced beyond even the wildest dreams of the early pioneers and this situation continues today with the fantastic opportunities presented by the computer age.

One company that has recently celebrated a hundred years in the signalling business is Bombardier, which has duly produced a book to record the history and achievements of its ancestry over this period.

Early milestonesThe first public railway, between Stockton and

Darlington in NE England, was in 1825 and it was quickly realised that a means of fixed signalling was needed with the rapid growth of rail transport. Traditional semaphore signals were well established by 1840 and 1843 saw the first telegraph in operation.

In Sweden, signalling was implemented by ‘local workshops’. The company Ericsson began business in 1876 and entered the signalling business by producing its first mechanical interlocking in 1888. Then, in 1915, SJ (the Swedish Railway company) asked Ericsson to form a railway technical department, which became Signalbolaget (The Signal Company).

This is the date from which Bombardier measures its centenary. The initial business was focussed on export orders, with LM Ericsson supplying an electrical interlocking for Russia. Going forward from that beginning in 1915, the companies that today make up the present Bombardier Rail Control Solutions were busily engaged in developing some notable engineering advances.

The Bombardier heritageBombardier is a Canadian company that started life in

1937 making snowmobiles. Perhaps better known for its involvement in the aircraft business, it made its first acquisition outside Canada in 1971 and so entered the rail sector.

Having won a contract in 1974 for supplying the mass transit system for the Montreal subway, and following various mergers and acquisitions, Bombardier has become a global player in railways, both in signalling and rolling stock provision. The ancestral history of the signalling element is both interesting and complex.

(Right) Signalwoman operating manual interlocking in Great Central near Birmingham, England, 1918.

(Below) Stockholm-Roslagen Railway (SRJ) locomotive no.5 'Wallentuna' with flat car loaded with overhead wire on Stockholm - Djursholm, the first line to be electrified in Sweden, 1895.


» 1915-1988 - Ericsson was the dominant signalling supplier in Sweden

» 1929 - Ericsson established a signalling business in Spain

» 1935 - Dansk Signal Industri (Denmark) acquired by Ericsson

» 1957 - ML Engineering established in the UK » 1970 - Ericsson Signalling in Italy is founded » 1989 - Ericsson Signal business transferred to EB

Signal, subsequently becoming ABB Signal » 1989 - ML Engineering acquired by EB Signal » 1990 - EB Signal starts business in Portugal » 1991 - ABB Signal India is established » 1992 - ABB Signal established in both Finland and

Poland » 1996 - IVV in Germany, a company established in 1980

by academics to plan mass transit and main line railway projects, is acquired by ABB

» 1996 - AEG Westinghouse (USA) integrated into ABB » 1996 - ABB Transportation and AEG Schienenfahrzeuge

(part of Daimler Benz) merge to become Adtranz » 1999 - Daimler Benz becomes sole owner of Adtranz » 2001 - Bombardier acquires Adtranz and forms

Bombardier Rail Control Solutions » 2010 - JV with Elteza in Russia formed » 2014 - RSS Australia acquired » 2015 - Bombardier NUG Signalling Solutions Co formed

as a JV in China » 2015 - Bombardier Rail Control Solutions celebrate its

centenary, employing 3,600 people world wide.

Driving the technologySignalling is almost an obsolete term nowadays, the

more appropriate title being Control and Communications. Companies in this discipline today cannot progress without having skills that span the full range of technologies required to control a modern railway. Bombardier and its ancestry can chalk up some notable firsts in recent years: » Centralised Train Control. Following a centralised

relay-based train management system introduced in Sweden in the late 1960s, the first fully-electronic CTC system using computers was commissioned in 1971 at Stockholm Central. This covered 377km of route and 60 stations. From this, emerged the EBI Screen product that is commonplace today.

(Above) World's first computer-based interlocking, EBI Lock 750, for Centralised Traffic Control, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1978.

(Inset) CRSC Test Lab, Beijing.

PHOTO: YUN

FEI QI


» Electronic Interlockings. The world’s first computer-based interlocking was brought into service at Gothenburg in 1978. This stemmed from joint thinking by both SJ and Ericsson, requiring the development of a new logic language named STERNOL, named after Bengt Sterner and Dag Nordenfors, both from SJ but working closely with Ericsson. Recognising that safety was paramount, they adopted techniques used by the American NASA organisation to gain acceptance of computers in the use of railway signalling. In 2009, Bengt received the European Railway Award in recognition of this pioneering work. The interlocking has been developed since that beginning and is now marketed as EBI Lock 950, it being used by many railways across the world.

» Automatic Train Protection (ATP). The need for improved driving aids and particularly drivers failing to observe red signals was an increasing worry on most railways in the 1970s. Reacting to this, Ericsson in conjunction with SJ developed a balise-based system now known as EBI Cab, which has been deployed in both main line and metro applications.

» ERTMS. No description of new signalling technology can be complete these days without some reference to the European Rail Traffic Management System. Bombardier

along with the other major signalling companies has been collaboratively involved in the development, more accurately with the ETCS (European Train Control System) element. In 2001, Adtranz supplied the first ERTMS Level 2 system for commercial operation on the Olten-Lucerne line in Switzerland. Perhaps an even more notable achievement has been the introduction of ERTMS Level 3 on rural lines in Sweden. Known as Regional ERTMS, these lines may yet pave the way for deployment of Level 3 onto busier routes. Bombardier has branded its ERTMS product INTERFLO and has equipped 27,000km of route and 3,000 vehicles around the world.

» Automatic People Movers. With its origins in the USA, and as a result of the Westinghouse/AEG acquisition, the Skybus automated rubber-wheeled electric vehicle has become commonplace for transit systems at major airports since 1966.

» Automated Metro Systems. Having to deal with significant population growth in recent years, cities have invested in high-capacity metro systems and Bombardier has been at the forefront in developing CBTC (Communications Based Train Control) technology. Leading the way with the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system in San Francisco back in 1972, this was followed


by a radio-based moving block system at San Francisco airport in 2003. From these emerged the CITYFLO product now in service on Metro de Madrid and, latterly, in the Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Tianjin.

The UK dimensionML Engineering, established in 1959 in Plymouth, won

the contract for Stoke Powerbox as part of the original West Coast main line electrification. Fortunes varied thereafter, with the company being acquired by EB in 1989. The development of the TI 21 track circuit has been a huge success and thousands are deployed across the UK rail network. Now re-badged EBI Track 200, the design has been upgraded over the years, with the new generation EBI Track 400 deployed for Thameslink, and continues to be the first choice when jointless track circuits are needed.

CITYFLO mass transit systems have been supplied for the Glasgow, Manchester and Nottingham tram networks plus people movers at Gatwick and Heathrow T5 airports. A new level crossing design for rural locations – the EBI Gate 200 – is aimed at improving safety for pedestrians at these vulnerable sites. A recent success has been the award to supply EBI Cab 2000 equipment for the Crossrail trains, which will include EBI Drive equipment for driver

advisory operational information. A further success has been the installation of depot signalling solutions.

Bombardier has experienced some disappointment with the intended deployment of the EBI Lock interlocking not being pursued in the UK so far, but remains positive that opportunities may arise in the future. but this has been partly due to the inflexibility of British signalling and operating rules and the expensive adaptation of the product needed to meet these.

The London Underground sub surface lines re-signalling contract which was mutually released by Bombardier and London Underground, caused a number of lessons to be learned despite the success of the CITYFLO solution in many other cities . All companies suffer setbacks from time to time but understanding the causes is all part of the advancement regime.

Both in the UK and globally, Bombardier can be very proud of its signalling ancestry despite its complex structure. Managers and engineers down the years have had the vision to see a progressive way forward that combined the winning of contracts with the development of new products and systems. It has established itself as a global supplier and with that comes the readiness to adapt to local conditions and requirements.

Long may it continue to be successful.


The often-criticised Great Eastern route from London to Chelmsford in Essex has suffered from overhead line equipment (OLE) unreliability for some considerable time. This is not really surprising as the OLE has its origins in the 1940s as part of the original LNER-engineered

1500V DC system. First introduced from the late 1940s through to the mid-1950s, it was converted to 25kV AC in the early 1960s.

The contact system has proven to be unable to perform on this most heavily trafficked route and both train operating company and Network Rail were under pressure to improve matters.

The basic project requirements called for a comprehensive renewal and replacement of the wiring and associated parts and entailed the use of a designer and manufacturer new to the UK. Phase one of the scheme would cover the old Great Eastern Railway route from London Liverpool Street through busy Stratford and out via Brentwood to Chelmsford. Phase two would be looking at the other ex-1500V system, from Shenfield to Southend.

Technical considerationsCollaborative Project Management Services

has been involved with the project since the early days. Managing director Mat Baine took the decision to re-examine the works, review the programme and freshen the scheme approach. It was necessary to think exactly what the scheme was and how to treat the project design and construction process.

Basically the job entailed replacing the old Great Eastern Line equipment with a new bespoke design of Great Eastern Furrer and Frey (GEFF) electrification hardware, all fitted to the ex-1500V structures. Mat emphasised that it was not an OLE renewal and not an OLE project.

The differences between old and new are significant. The old equipment was fixed-tension, the new is auto-tension style. The old required speed restrictions when temperatures reached 25ºC yet the new could operate at up to 40ºC without speed limits. In addition, the old system had very limited electrical clearances with their associated performance risks while the new had none of that.

Further, the old system suffered from high maintenance costs requiring a four-year maintenance cycle as against the new system which was designed to deliver between six and, hopefully, eight-year maintenance cycles. Within those frequencies, the early system planned maintenance required four shifts of work per wire run whilst the GEFF system required only two, reducing six-year maintenance costs by two thirds. The new system is confidently expected to deliver 4.6 years mean time between failure (MTBF) per track mile, as against 0.21yrs MTBF per track mile of the existing installation.

Project elementsAn electrification project is more than a contact

system erection task. It is formed of many stages, typically: outline design - final design - trial holes and surveys - foundation installation - design - wire runs - small part steelwork - mast installation - boom installation.

Mat has very firm views on the project process and used the ‘plan, do, review’ cycle as the basis of the team’s approach. The team is, in fact, a set of teams, the ‘OLE Project Team’, formed as: » Advanced works team » Civil engineering and design team » OLE team » Principal contractor team » Support Teams.All the above are held together and in-line

by the programme manager, centred on collaboration. Within the team there are also ‘non-physical’ elements such as procurement, planning and integration, and possession management.

Mat was keen to explain his thoughts on procurement. He found that the procurement strategy had been very piecemeal and had not given tenderers sufficient scope to look at the longer term and invest time and money in their tenders. The strategy was revised to alter the size and make-up of the scope elements to allow bidders to take a longer view. Where performance has been good, they have been able to offer production economies as part of feeling more embedded in the programme.

As part of the revisit, the project was re-estimated from first principles for the remaining work using internal project cost information. Key challenges in the production of the estimate included: » Quantifying the staged construction

methodology due to the changes in possession access;

» Establishing unit costs for key activities and understanding achievable productivity;

Coasting to Success!(Great Eastern Overhead Line Renewal)

PETER STANTON

Rail Engineer • December 201534EL

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» The quantification of risk when delivering to a revised delivery model (incorporating key lessons learnt).

Foundations can be the Achilles heel of an electrification scheme. By nature, the composition of the ground will be uncertain and a pre-designed foundation may not always be suitable for the location - either too robust or insufficient. Careful investigation allowed the load assumed under generic pile range designs to be re-assessed and generated large savings during installation.

An electrification scheme will require large quantities of diverse materials of high cost and significant handling liability. A review of the locations revealed a varied number of sites and even rented locations in use. With the scale of the programme being reasonably certain and designs predictable, a decision was made to purchase warehousing and rationalise the materials to a store on a single site, accompanied again by significant financial and operational savings. Similarly, a decision was made to purchase site cabins, a necessary requirement under law but also a motivator for staff in the line of better messing and welfare conditions.

Welfare leads to safe working and the project has placed great emphasis on some of the detail in that sphere. A real hazard from working on old equipment is the presence of lead in finishes and, following a detailed risk assessment, it was realised that the gas cutting of old structures carried a risk from the paint. To that end, ventilated masks were provided for the task.

All staff have been encouraged to undertake, and pass, IOSH training and close call notices are part of everyday procedure and practice. Site entrances are notorious for slippery and uneven conditions and another campaign has been to renovate the access points used in the scheme to allow a clean and safe passage. Safety behaviour is not always 100% and a close eye is kept for unsafe acts, followed by suitable counselling.

To sum up the team approach, Mat would quote the old adage: “Smarter, not harder.” One example of that is the practice which attracted Rail Engineer to this project in the first place.

CoastingThe project asked itself the following question,

when running an overhead line wire adjacent to an open road, how do you:

A. Keep passengers moving?B. Keep staff safe from electrocution?C. Keep on target for hitting planned volumesThe answer that was worked out was:

“COASTING!”The geography, and thus the gradient profiles,

of the Great Eastern main line lends itself to gravity being viable as a traction source for trains. The connection then is that staff can work

on the OLE, on a multi-track main line, in a safe situation with adjacent roads open to traffic but electrically isolated. They are protected from trains by their workplace and the electrical threat has been placed away where there is no hazard.

Safe working is allowing a viable flow of trains in the Up line while coasting as the Down line carries a normal service with full electric traction facilities. The work on the Down main is without electrical risk yet gaining flexible and productive access and the MEWP (mobile elevated work platform) is based safely on the Up main.

The project is proud to say that it has erected 10 wire runs of approximately 7,200 metres length while working in excess of 16,000 man hours without accident or incident. The performance statistics put the operation into perspective - the project has coasted 700 trains which have rolled for over 3,000 miles!

There has been significant gains for passengers, Network Rail and the train operators with 133,000 passengers moved and over £600,000 saved on replacement buses.

Whilst trains have coasted for many years, and that is a property that rail has as a system characteristic, the planned application of the process is not so common. Careful risk

assessment was applied and safety features were assured in the planning process. Operational risk was also considered and again this was assessed to facilitate acceptance of the process.

As well as effective briefing, rail staff need to be properly advised of the condition of the railway and a suite of signs has been erected to clarify conditions, positions and required behaviours. Advance warning is given as the train approaches the lower pantograph sign at permissible linespeed and duly lowers the pantograph. The safe zone to raise the pantograph is identified by suitable signage at the other end of the site. The signalling staff are a part of the process - the signaller has the responsibility to instruct the train driver of arrangements when agreed with a competent person.

A train having to brake or come to a stand is not seen as high risk as there are electrification staff on site and a safe situation to allow re-energisation of the isolated line can be quickly arranged.

In essence, this project has shown that, whilst criticism of electrification engineering works has been made, there is still plenty of room for innovation and smarter ways of working.

Trains coast through the section adjacent to the work.

Rail Engineer • December 2015 35ELECTRIFICATION/POW

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One of the busiest rail hubs on the UK network, Reading, was notorious over the years as a bottleneck blackspot. To address this, Network Rail has spent the past five years carrying out a programme of improvements that has seen the redevelopment of the station, redesign of the

complex track layout and construction of a new maintenance, cleaning and storage depot.

The programme also paves the way for phased electrification of the Great Western mainline, beginning with the section that links it to the Crossrail network. It has been ambitious in scope, involving a variety of contractors working closely with Network Rail to ensure minimum disruption and continuity of passenger and freight services, while delivering enhanced capacity and efficiency.

An increase in the number of platforms at the station, track improvements and modifications to the local infrastructure to enable mainline services to travel on freight and relief lines have also futureproofed the Reading hub for further increases in passenger numbers. Meanwhile, track improvements will enable six additional freight trains to move through the area each day, moving goods equivalent to 200 lorries.

Collaborative approachThe new maintenance and cleaning depot

at Reading is integral to the project’s ability to answer the need for both greater capacity and electrification on the Great Western line. However, phasing of this aspect of the works has involved a degree of pragmatism, involving construction of the depot to meet immediate cleaning, maintenance and storage needs, with electrification works following to fit in with the remainder of the programme.

The electrification works for the depot, were themselves, divided into two phases, with phase II delayed until modifications to the westbound tracks had been completed. Lundy Projects was appointed as principal contractor for this phase of works and brought in the electrification expertise

of Spanish rail sector specialist, Electren, to complete all the SPS (Small Parts Steelwork), wiring, switching and bonding elements of the scheme.

Keith Riley from Lundy Projects explained: “We have been a principal contractor licensee to Network Rail since 2007 and we have proven expertise in electrification schemes. Our team delivered the foundations and main steelwork for the project, bringing in Electren’s experience of all aspects of electrification projects to complete the remainder under our management.

“While the project was only on site for nine weeks, the scheme is the result of more than a year of collaborative working between Lundy and Electren, ensuring that the partnership between the companies delivers a seamless approach, drawing on proven specialisms. Following the success of the Reading depot installation, we aim to continue our collaboration on further UK electrification projects.”

European experienceWhile the Reading depot scheme is the

first for Electren in the UK, it draws upon the company’s considerable electrification experience across Europe, particularly its involvement in the electrification of the main high-speed, conventional and underground lines in Spain. Electren has also expanded into other markets, with extensive experience on the French and Polish networks and presence in North America (US and Canada).

As a result of the traction power substations works experience, mostly on Spanish high-speed lines, Electren is now involved in the Network Rail CP5 National Substation Supply Framework and is member of the Switchgear and Substation Alliance (SSA).

Spanish solutions(Delivering OLE projects using European experience)


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ELECTREN UK, part of the ACS holding group, is a company specialising in power distribution and overhead line equipment for the railway industry with over 25 years’ experience. Our main principles are: safety at work, innovation and new solutions and collaborative working.

Since 2013 we participate very actively in the improvement of rail infrastructure in the UK. Today we can be proud to participate in different projects:

• Involved in the NR CP5 National Substation Supply Framework. ELECTREN UK is member of the Switchgear and Substation Alliance (SSA), a joint venture appointed for providing new designed compact air insulated switchgear [CAIS] substations with low maintenance demands and low environmental impact.

• Contractor of Lundy Projects in the Reading Depot electrification works (electrification of the First Great Western Reading Depot), in addition to the Great Western electrification project.

• Designing electrification solutions to avoid bridge and tunnel reconstruction thanks to the support of the Future Railway Programme (RSSB). • London Underground HV substation framework. ELECTREN UK is one of 17 suppliers selected for the power upgrade programme.

More information: ELECTREN UK LTD. 1-5 Queen StreetLondon EC4N 1SWWeb: www.electren.co.uk Mail: [email protected] Phone: (+44) 0118925492

ENERGY FOR THE RAILWAY

Electren’s approach is to ensure that the company’s expertise is delivered on the ground for every scheme by employing its own retained operatives, all of whom are certified to OLE 3 competency. This not only ensures complete accountability for both the principal contractor and Network Rail, but also means that the project did not have to draw on UK critical OLE resources.

The Electren project manager for the Reading depot scheme, Javier Inglesias, has delivered more than 30 electrification projects in four different countries. As a result, he was very adaptable to the specific needs of the programme and, while he had never before come across the Mark3B OLE technology used at Reading, his experience ensured that he was able to manage the scheme successfully and anticipate any potential problems.

Phased challengeThe phasing of the depot electrification works and the decision to appoint

new contractors for Phase II created significant challenges for Electren in the planning of the works. The Electren team meticulously checked the design and cross-referenced the completed Phase I works against the design and BoQ (Bill of Quantities) that had been signed off by Network Rail for the whole project to ensure that mistakes and delays were avoided in the delivery of the Phase II works.

Electren’s contract responsible engineer on the Reading depot scheme, Santiago Varela, explained: “There was a single BoQ covering both phases of the scheme, so we had to cross-reference the materials that had been used for phase I to ensure we followed the correct specification for the phase II scheme.

“By compiling our own BoQ in this way before we started on site, our team could also ensure that any necessary design modifications were identified and approved in advance, enabling us to deliver the works to a clearly defined programme with no delays once the team was on site.”

The Electren site team varied between 10 and 14 operatives at any one time, with most of the works being carried out during daylight hours under ALO (Adjacent Line Open) conditions to enable the depot to operate as usual for maintenance and cleaning during the night.

Planning and site efficiency were critical to addressing these challenges and all of the SPS, along with some of the wiring, was pre-fabricated in the stores on site.

“Typically, we would arrive on site at 7am and pick up the materials for the day from the stores,” Santiago Varela continued. “During the two-week SPS works, all items for each day would have been prefabricated and checked the previous day ready for installation.”

Best practiceThrough meticulous planning, collaborative working and an efficient

approach to site delivery, the Phase II OLE works at Reading depot were completed two shifts ahead of schedule.

“Planning, teamwork and specialist skills were critical to the success of this project,” Keith Riley summarised. “Electren clearly demonstrated the value of the company’s European experience. Preassembled wiring for OLE mast installations may not be typical in the UK but it provided time and safety advantages on this scheme. We’re delighted to have been involved in bringing European best practice to the UK rail sector by working with Electren on this scheme.”


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In 2012, Danish rail operator Banedanmark embarked on an ambitious 14-year project to electrify large parts of the country’s rail network. The programme is designed to create a sustainable and flexible framework for the operation of modern passenger and freight rail networks, capable of delivering a more stable and more cost-effective operation.

At the same time, it is intended to achieve environmental benefits from an expanded fleet of electric trains which will provide a cleaner, quieter and more efficient operation with reduced pollution.

Joint programmeSiemens Rail Electrification was awarded a contract in

May 2015 by Banedanmark to electrify nine rail routes, with the company appointed to equip about 1,300 kilometres of the country’s rail network with electrical overhead lines.

“We are extremely proud to have been awarded this prestigious contract,” said Therese Persson from Siemens Rail Electrification in Denmark. “Our overhead contact line systems increase the availability and cost-effectiveness of rail routes, while at the same time offering operators a green alternative to diesel traction.”

The company is working as part of a consortium with construction partner Per Aarsleff AS, and will fit overhead contact lines in a 2x25kV configuration to nine tracks on the network by the end of 2026. The electricity supply will also be installed with substations, autotransformer stations and remote-control equipment. This ambitious project will kick off with the electrification of the 57km double-track stretch between Esbjerg and Lunderskov in the west of the country.

ElectrifyingDenmark


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This joint programme represents the beginning of the electrification project and will see the introduction of a new electrification system based on functional requirements as set out in the project specification. The programme called for a system: » Approved against Technical Standards for

Interoperability (TSI); » Whose benefits have already been proven in an

extensive roll-out elsewhere in Europe; » That could push innovation; » Which would be delivered by suppliers with an

established track record in the design and delivery of complex, large scale projects.

Siemens’ proposal, which had at its heart the company’s Sicat SX solution for the overhead contact line, was accepted by Banedanmark and is now being rolled-out.

Material savingThe Sicat SX system allows greater distances between

poles and so has an overall requirement for much less steelwork than conventional systems. For the first stretch in Denmark, a maximum pole distance of 110 metres has been achieved.

The system has also been designed to be easy and fast to install - with an accurate software tool for planning the layout, the cantilevers were preassembled with a quick-fixing device, enabling a more flexible, efficient and cost-effective build programme to be followed.

Therese Persson continued: “The most important features of the system are its lightweight design and the reduction of poles and foundations which bring a safer working environment for the installation programme, with reduced risk of accidents due to fewer possessions being required in the build phase.

“The 10-year programme will also eliminate ramp-up and ramp-down costs, and will ensure that the knowledge and experience gained in the early stages stay with the project throughout its life.

‘The functional design-and-build turnkey approach also drastically reduces the need for handling interfaces, allowing suppliers to offer a well-integrated and optimal solution. The installation of large volumes of the same system will provide economies of scale and learning curve savings in all phases of the project, from design and procurement through to installation.”

UK impactThe Danish programme could also bring benefits to

the UK. James Goulding of Siemens Rail Electrification said: “From a review of this work in Denmark, we could prepare a model to address some of the challenges that the National Electrification Programme in the UK will face, with the ultimate aim of producing a safer, more cost-efficient and a less risky approach to delivery.

“Sicat SX needs fewer foundations per kilometre as it is designed for longer span length. Being able to deliver more overhead contact line equipment construction within the UK’s tight midweek possession regime would see significant cost savings. This would be especially the case on routes that have been, or will be, affected by the Government’s electrification review.”

Electrified rail networks allow better acceleration and shorter travel times, as well as reduced operating and maintenance costs for the operators. Electric traction is globally acknowledged as the most powerful, fastest and most environmentally sound means of transporting passengers and freight.


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With Network Rail under increased scrutiny for its part in train punctuality performance, reliability of the infrastructure becomes ever more important. One of the recurring themes

as to why trains are late and cancelled, along with the old chestnuts of signalling failure and leaves on the line, is that the wires are down. This can be anything from a simple break (although even that can take time to fix), to a train having rolled all the catenary up into a ball over a mile or more.

Frequently such incidents are caused by defective pantographs on the trains, which can inflict significant damage to overhead wires and associated apparatus including, in extreme cases, a catastrophic de-wirement.

Real-time monitoringPantographs, and the thin carbon strips they carry to draw current from the

overhead contact wire, are usually subjected to thorough manual inspections during scheduled maintenance windows.

In-between these checks, maintenance teams will often rely on a visual check taken from the depot floor. However, with pantographs in constant use and operating under all weather conditions, defects can quickly accumulate.

Remote monitoring technology enables infrastructure owners to identify those vehicles in operation that are at greater risk of inflicting damage to the network’s wires due to general wear and tear. It can then help them to work with operators to take early preventative action and, ultimately, extend the life of both the wires and the pantograph equipment carried by the trains.

The current Panchex system was originally installed during the 1980s but only monitors the uplift forces from passing pantographs. It is now expensive and disruptive to maintain and is considered to be reaching the end of its serviceable life.

Furthermore, its location within the live 25kV catenary system means that some of its components can only be accessed when lines are closed to traffic and overhead lines isolated, adversely affecting the availability of the system.

This led to Network Rail and industry stakeholders looking for a ‘modern equivalent’ successor system, combining reliable round-the-clock uplift monitoring with additional condition-monitoring capabilities, whilst being easier and safer to operate and maintain.

Developing PanMon Ricardo Rail (formerly Lloyd’s Register Rail) developed PanMon to meet this

need. The system uses Sensys’ Automatic Pantograph Monitoring System (APMS) to provide high definition images of each passing pantograph through a combination of radar, laser, video and photo technology, and an innovative new contactless optical Uplift Monitoring system developed by Ricardo Rail in association with Italian-based optical monitoring specialists DMA S.r.l, Turin.

Using specialist pattern-recognition analysis software, the system automatically interprets the data to provide ongoing condition reports of each passing pantograph. This includes identifying the remaining thickness of carbon strips or any damage to the pantograph’s head, aerofoils or end horns, which can affect a vehicle’s ability to maintain good contact with overhead wires.

The system can also measure the uplift of the contact wire resulting from the force applied by the pantograph - uplifts exceeding specified limits can cause considerable damage to both the pantograph and catenary.

Approval trials commenced at Cheddington, in Buckinghamshire, in March 2013. During these, the system was assessed against Network Rail’s criteria that it should: » Measure a minimum of 90% of passing traffic; » Capture measurements of carbon thickness on pantographs to within

2mm; » Deliver accurate measurements of uplift forces; » Consistently detect chips and defects larger than 25% of the carbon surface

width; » Identify each passing vehicle; » Record and report local weather conditions (wind direction / speed,

temperature etc).Throughout the trials, PanMon proved capable of providing continuous and

accurate measurements of pantograph uplift forces and defects (including chips, damaged end-horns and worn carbon strips) from trains passing at speeds of up to 125mph. As a result, the PanMon system is now designated for roll-out as a replacement of the Panchex system.

Network Rail’s project manager for the PanMon trial at Cheddington, Mike Dobbs, was pleased with the result. “Getting new technology to work accurately and reliably in the rail environment can be challenging,” he said, “but Ricardo Rail has worked closely with us to overcome the difficulties and we are now able to start the process of replacing our old Panchex systems with a twenty-first century solution.”

passes trialsPANtograph MONitoring

(Left) PanMon image taken at 192 km/h.


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Delivering Excellence Through Innovation & Technology rail.ricardo.com

RicardoRailFormerly Lloyd’s Register Rail

Lloyd’s Register Rail is now Ricardo Rail▪ Independent assurance ▪ Technical consulting ▪ Performance engineering

By combining Lloyd’s Register Rail’s technical and assurance expertise with Ricardo’s engineering capabilities, we are helping our clients to improve the safety, quality and performance of the world’s railways.

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The rail industry is, like many sectors, continually looking for more efficient, effective and commercially viable ways of operating. As a result, a process which is becoming much more widespread is the

galvanizing of steel. Steel is a vital raw material used across the industry, from network infrastructure to smaller assets including safety fencing and signage. So, what is galvanizing, what is the technology behind it, and what projects within the industry is the process being used on?

Hot-dip galvanizing involves steel being cleaned and then dipped into molten zinc at temperatures up to 450oC, where a series of zinc-iron layers are formed by a

metallurgical reaction between the iron and zinc creating a long-lasting, durable coating. Because it forms alloy layers with the iron in the steel it is much more robust

than other coatings which only bond chemically or mechanically and can easily be damaged.

Galvanizing really comes into its own when it comes to sustainability, with a single treatment able to coat a product inside and out, as well as being able to protect steel for up to 60 years, or longer if the conditions are right.

Even in the harshest of environments, it can last two or three decades. As a result, the whole life costs of products protected by hot-dip galvanizing can be significantly reduced because there is no need for expensive down-time and the inconvenience of repeated on-site maintenance and repair, an appealing aspect for many rail operators.

Galvanized in ManchesterTo showcase the real value

of the process to the industry, Manchester Galvanizing, part of Wedge Group Galvanizing, regularly hosts dedicated open days for the rail sector. These provide inspectors, buyers and other core personnel the opportunity to see the galvanizing process ‘up close’, so they can learn how galvanizing fits in with CE Marking and get best practice tips for inspection of galvanised

steelwork. The Group is also proud to be an approved supplier for the Railway Industry Supplier Qualification Scheme (RISQS).

Manchester Galvanizing has been involved with a variety of rail projects, including the refurbishment of the iconic Hull and Barnsley railway bridge (pictured below) which saw them galvanize over 25 tonnes of structural steel as part of work to strengthen the bridge and ensure the track remains operational for its current capacity.

The company also did work on the grade II listed Silver Jubilee Bridge, one of the world’s longest steel arched bridges which runs over the River Mersey, connecting Runcorn to Widnes and sees 80,000 motorists a day pass over it.

Over 200 tonnes of steel was galvanized as part of the £25million project to transform Edinburgh’s Haymarket Station into a major transport link, material for the production of canopies installed above the station’s newly-extended platforms.

The C503 Crossrail Contract refurbishment works at Liverpool Street Station also saw over 100 tonnes of steel protected long term with hot dip galvanizing.

Galvanizing the industry


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Electrified railways in the UK have existed for well over a century and much has been written on the types of system and their voltages. The merits and downsides of overhead lines versus third rail, and DC versus

AC, continue to be a topic of conversation when traction engineers meet both at seminars and social gatherings.

In contrast, the methods by which the traction current is controlled attract little attention, but without a robust system, the electrification would be unmanageable. Electric power is delivered to the railway from the national grid, although it was not unknown in earlier times for rail companies to build their own power stations. The method of distribution supply is very different for AC and DC systems, although both need periodic connections to national grid lines.

AC systemsThe architecture of AC electrification

is simple. Feeder Stations are the grid in-feed locations where the high voltage grid is transformed to 25kV (or 50kV for the latest auto transformer systems) from the high voltage national grid at sites where pylon routes cross the railway. These are positioned about 40km apart and thus feed current for around 20km in each direction.

Where the ends of adjacent grid in-feeds meet, there is a neutral section, which is a very short piece of unpowered catenary. These prevent

out-of-phase paralleling between grid supplies which would replicate fault conditions.

Track Sectioning Cabins (TSCs), positioned at feeder stations and intermediate locations, are where switching of the discrete electrical sections to individual catenaries can be implemented. Should a Feeder Station lose the grid in-feed, then emergency feeding arrangements can be put in place by extending the power from adjacent feeder stations, thus lengthening the feeder distance to around 40km.

Significant voltage regulation issues may occur at the extreme ends of the sections, and the voltage can drop to as low as 17kV. This is not a major problem unless rail traffic levels are high, when train regulation restrictions might have to be put in place.

DC differencesA DC system, with its lower

voltages, requires a more complicated arrangement. Since load current values are high, voltage regulation requirements dictate that

feeder points have to be, typically, 5km apart. It would be operationally and commercially impractical to have grid connections at such short distances, so an AC network is provided by the railway to create an internal distribution network. The infrastructure owner thus owns a ‘mini grid’ supply to the substations where the power is rectified and DC current is fed to the overhead line or third rail.

On the extensive UK ex-Southern Region third-rail system in Kent, Sussex and Wessex, the AC network is predominantly at 33kV although, in remoter areas, it can be 22kV or 11kV. Power from the grid is obtained from around 40 supply locations with switching stations not always adjacent to a Network Rail site, maybe up to two kilometres distant.

The AC distribution cables are carried in trackside cable routes separate to any other lineside application, such as signalling. Each substation rectifies the AC voltage to DC, either at 1500V for overhead lines (Tyne & Wear Metro) or 750V for third rail. Nowadays, the equipment to do this is solid state but, in the past, rotary convertors and mercury arc rectifiers were used. Unlike AC, the DC electrical sections can be continuously connected and paralleling is used

CLIVE KESSELL

electrification controlThe future for


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to assist power supply regulation. Between substations, Track Paralleling Huts (TPHs) are located that allow localised switching of power to different overhead catenaries or third rail tracks.

Controlling the power supplyFor both AC and DC, the

electrification system must be capable of being controlled from an Electrical Control Room (ECR). In the event of fault conditions such as a short circuit, automatic circuit breakers at the feeder station or substation(s) will trip to disconnect current from the catenary or third rail.

In an emergency, typically a person in danger of electrocution by being in contact with the catenary or third rail, the current may need to be switched off quickly and manual intervention from the ECR controller is required. The control room also undertakes routine planning and implements tasks such as isolations for maintenance work, monitoring the level of supply current and liaison with the national grid authorities for any prime source power problems.

Since electrification systems go back over a hundred years, many different technologies and practices for control of the electric current have emerged. On AC systems, the usual arrangement has been the provision of data links (known as ‘pilots’) from the ECR to the traction power locations. These low capacity data links are carried on telecom circuits provided by the S&T department.

The requirement for resilience is met by having A and B pilots routed in different cable or transmission systems in diverse routes. On occasions and for pragmatic reasons, it was known that the two pilots were borne on different cables within the same trough route but this was sub-standard practice.

On other legacy systems (typically the older DC network), the traction power sites use a separate cable transmission network provided entirely by the electrification and plant engineers. These are located in trough routes, separated from any high voltage feeders by different compartments and thus minimising the risk of mutual contact.

Thirteen ECRs currently exist at the following locations: » AC lines - Romford, York (some DC),

Rugby (some DC), Crewe, Cathcart; » DC lines - Lewisham, Selhurst,

Raynes Park, Eastleigh, Brighton, Paddock Wood, Canterbury, Sandhills (for Merseyrail).

Strangely, the combining of ECRs with modern signalling power box locations never happened, maybe because departmental preferences compartmentalised the thinking. Network Rail is implementing a national SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system that will integrate electrical control into the new Rail Operating Centres (ROCs). The main contractor for this project is Telent, which has a long pedigree of supplying railway telecommunications systems.

Project scopeThe goal is to create a single, unified

electrification control network for the main line railways of Britain, but with a staged approach to match other electrification works. The majority of the thirteen existing ECR sites have control equipment that is becoming life-expired. The oldest systems still employ discrete switches and mechanical switchgear and even the earlier screen-based systems are obsolete. Spares are often difficult to obtain and familiarity with the ageing technology can be a problem.

SCADA demonstration room at Telent.


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Couple this with the new electrification projects - Great Western route modernisation (GWRM), Welsh valleys, Midland main line, North West, Trans-Pennine, Edinburgh to Glasgow - and a clear need has emerged to provide a unified means of control for both the existing and new sections of electrified railway. This is set out in the requirements of CP5 as a principle for new electrification schemes. It is also recognised that much of the remote equipment associated with the existing ECRs that control the AC lines is still relatively new and does not justify renewal at the present time.

The project is thus partly renewal-driven and partly to support new electrification deployment. The new control equipment will be installed, initially, at the existing ECR sites. There are nine ECRs that will retain their legacy remote equipment including the associated communications or pilots. Four ECRs on the DC network will require more significant works to provide

both the new control network and the replacement of existing electro-mechanical switching equipment at 250 of the substations and TPH sites.

In time, a rationalisation of the existing ECRs will occur, with transfer of control to the ROCs. With the creation of a single resilient UK unified control platform, this transfer of control location will be made possible by the flexibility of the transmission architecture. Telent will undertake this work on behalf of Network Rail, including the electro-mechanical control replacement at the older sites on the DC lines.

The SCADA requirementSCADA technology has been around

for some time but application on a national scale within Network Rail has only become a practical proposition with the provision of the NRT (Network Rail Telecom) Fixed Telecom Network (FTN) and its associated fibre cabling and digital transmission systems. FTN is currently being upgraded to FTNx that embraces IP (Internet Protocol) addressing

and technology. Within this will be structured a WAN ‘cloud’ for the SCADA project.

FTNx will have ‘points of presence’ and fibre connections at all the ROC and ECR sites. NRT provides access links on an ‘as required’ basis so, if fibre does not exist at places where a break-out point is required, then new fibre links, installed under a separate Network Rail contract, will be terminated, tested and integrated by Telent. The use of IP will also permit a voice facility to be superimposed upon the data network (VoIP - voice over Internet protocol), thus creating a virtual private telephone network for those needing to interface with ECR operations.

The SCADA project will have data centres at Manchester and Three Bridges ROC sites (two are needed to provide a resilient system) that will service the existing ECR sites using new control equipment together with screen based GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) displaying all the external supply and switching locations. These will have two large screens showing

Remote EL SCADA Site(No works Required)

Remote EM Site

EL ECR

Manchester / Three Bridges ROC

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Former Electronic ECRsCathcart, Crewe, Romford, Brighton, Eastleigh, Lewisham, Paddock Wood, Sandhills, Rugby, York

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250 Electro-mechanical locations formerly controlled by:Eastleigh ECR, Raynes Park ECR, Selhurst ECR, Canterbury ECR

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ROCs and Milton Keynes

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ROCs:Romford, Didcot, Gillingham, Basingstoke, Rugby, York, Glasgow, Cardiff, Derby, Edinburgh (network only)

RemoteEM Site

950 Electronic locations controlled via EL ECRs

Workstation Locations:Operations floorTraining RoomConfiguration Facility

Operator & Maintainer Processes/Procedures

Training Material

Key: Project scope

SCADA system overview.


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the diagrammatic layout of the electrification system for the area plus two smaller screens detailing alarms, event logs, out of course occurrences and suchlike.

Controllers will be able to interrogate the screens to show the status of individual switching locations and thus open and close circuit breakers as required using a mouse control. Identical arrangements will be provided at the ROC sites as these come on stream as and when ECR operation transfers to these sites.

Not all ROCs yet control areas of electrified railway, for example Didcot, Cardiff and Derby, but these will have the same capability so that electrification projects will have a ‘natural home’ for control when the time comes. Since the WAN cloud is a single entity, it will be relatively easy to add or delete sites as electrification policy unfolds. Data rates will vary according to need but two 100Mbit/sec links will connect the Three Bridges and Manchester data centres.

Progressing the projectNetwork Rail has been keen

to adopt a systems engineering approach to establish both the technical configuration and the method of operation. This has involved consultation with subject matter experts from the end user community. With the many complex requirements of the project, one of the first steps made by Telent has been the building of a reference system at their Warwick premises. This enables both supplier and customer both to assist with the development of the design and integration and to have the ability to make adaptations and fully test them as and when necessary to suit local circumstances at particular sites.

The first area to be transferred will be the electrified Heathrow Express service currently under the control of Romford ECR. With GWRM electrification and Crossrail well underway, it makes sense to transfer this to Didcot (Thames Valley) ROC and this will happen in 2016 so as to

be ready for the GWRM ‘power up’. No doubt there will be both technical and operational lessons to be learned as the new system is introduced, with the electrification controllers assisting the process of familiarisation, thus learning lessons for later sites.

After that, the first ECR site to be converted will be Romford, covering the whole of the Anglia electrified lines. Paddock Wood will follow, which will yield experience on the DC lines. Thereafter, a rolling programme will be implemented taking account of the progress of new electrification schemes and the condition of existing assets.

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Safety and securityIt must always be remembered that electrified

railways carry both high voltages and large currents. Safety factors have always been a high priority and part of this project has been to fully assess the safety aspects. The existing configuration has very little over-arching control redundancy and, should an ECR be disabled, then no effective control of the network will exist other than to staff the individual feeder stations and switching locations.

The new SCADA system will enable dual redundancy across the entire network with the ability to control a disabled site from another location if a disaster was to happen. This is a major improvement as much needed resilience is provided. The requirement to quickly switch off power in an emergency will be assured by both the IP-based telephone service and improved links to the NRT Railtel (ETD - extension trunk dialling) phone network and the 17x emergency call numbers to the ECRs.

Pressure to give the SCADA system a SIL (Safety Integrity Level) rating has been robustly assessed to guard against the introduction of overstated and ultimately meaningless complications. The assessment has led to a SIL 0 designation that will be reviewed by Ricardo Rail (formerly Lloyd’s Register Rail) acting as the independent safety assessor.

Cyber security is another important consideration. The CPNI (Centre for Protection

of National Infrastructure) has been consulted as the SCADA network falls into this category. The system has been designed and will be implemented with the CPNI guidelines for cyber security adopted and the system will be independently penetration-tested for potential security breaches. Encryption of the sensitive elements of the network is one such measure, another has been to security clear all Telent staff working on the project.

Contractual responsibilitiesThe Network Rail specification for the project

includes some 6,000 requirements, many arising from a robust systems requirements review post contract award. Collaboration between Network Rail and Telent is pivotal for success but Network Rail has many other stakeholders needing to be consulted to attain the necessary approvals.

Telent has 95 people engaged on the project covering design engineering, system engineering, software development and system integration, with the majority based at its Warwick site while others undertake site installation work. The company is working with Network Rail to get the required telecom infrastructure in place and Cisco will supply the data equipment (routers and terminals) and associated software. Other suppliers working on the project are: » Vitra for the supply of work station desks;

» Interfleet for the training of electrical control staff at the Three Bridges and Manchester sites;

» CCD for ergonomic considerations; » CNS for cyber security; » IP Trade for voice telephony.The overall contract has a publicised value

of £27 million but some variations to this are expected to cover changes in scope. The contract has been in existence since mid-2013 with a completion scheduled for the end of December 2017 for the basic network, by which time it is hoped that every main line electric train in the UK will be drawing traction current controlled by the new SCADA system.

This is a significant project with many inter-activities to other projects. Co-ordination and communication is thus an essential part. The end result will be a power supply network using the latest technology and standards that will be fit for purpose for decades to come. The new Network Rail SCADA system will provide the common national platform for the Digital Railway - SMART grid, leading the way for efficient use of energy and greater operational resilience.

Thanks to Scott Burt, Telent project director, for his time in explaining the project with all its ramifications, and to Saleem Mohammad, head of Network Rail’s national electrification programme, for his input.


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Working to a tight deadline and meeting the many challenges of a complex project, we have delivered electrification of the Rutherglen to Coatbridge and the Whifflet line, creating a vital link to the city’s suburban network

Delivering a vital link

www.carillionplc.com

Network Rail recently held its third National Electrification Conference at the Westwood conference centre. This eagerly anticipated event was very well attended with most of the movers and shakers from Network Rail and electrification-related companies present, giving an eclectic mix of participants and a well-informed and lively debate.

On this occasion, the conference took place in the light of much media attention on the Great Western Electrification Programme (GWEP) and the ‘pause’ of the Midland main line and Trans-Pennine schemes.

The day was opened by Saleem Mohammad, director of the National Electrification programme, who set the scene by presenting ‘The Affordability Challenge’.

Network Rail launched its new high-profile electrification programme with the intention of catching up with the percentage of electrified rail systems in other developed countries - it is anticipated that, in CP5 (by 31 March 2019), another 17% of the network will be electrified. Currently, only Latvia, Denmark and Greece have a lower percentage of electrified systems in Europe than the UK.

However, costs have escalated and Saleem’s challenge was to get unit costs down significantly - the day’s focus was to be on deliverability and affordability. Nevertheless, the advantages of electric traction are marked and can be quickly headlined as: » Sustainability » Greater reliability » Lighter trains » Lower operating costs, currently in the order of 60p

per train mile for diesel and only 40p per train mile for electric.

Supply chain and engineeringThe profile of the conference was reinforced by the

presence of the two keynote speakers - Graham Hopkins, Network Rail group safety, technical and engineering director, and Jon Shaw, Investment Projects’ Engineering Director.

Graham Hopkins has recently moved to Network Rail from Rolls Royce and he has brought with him some strong messages in regard to supply chain management. One is to allow designers to talk to the supply chain, potentially alarming the procurement team but giving absolute clarity to the design intent. His aim is to encourage the supply chain to look forward and help them establish long-term relationships. There is a need to get technology proven before it goes into service - a strong technology readiness process. This, accompanied by a vigorous application of systems engineering, brings together all the project requirements before design begins.

PETER STANTON

National ElectrificationConference

Lessons can be learned from companies such as Rolls Royce.


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Jon Shaw is another recent arrival at Network Rail and he gave his initial views as seen from the Infrastructure Projects point of view. He felt that, in the past, there had been shortcomings in the form of scope definition and that this should be applied to an engineering lifecycle through developed technical stage-gates. To that end, Network Rail has a project engineering handbook in development although, at this stage, the risk assessment content still has to be firmed up.

Regarding scope definition, Network Rail also aims to produce a new requirements-management policy, mandating the use of ‘Doors’ software - an IBM application for optimising communication, collaboration and verification. This will facilitate better undertaking of interface management with interface matrices, interface control documentation and inter-disciplinary reviews.

Current projects - GWEPThe conference moved on to discuss and review major

projects and their status, progress and lessons learned.The Great Western Electrification Programme (GWEP)

has received much recent attention from the media. Eric Mumm, implementation director, gave a valuable presentation on the situation with the project and how the future was to be tackled. He summarised it as “new trains, improved performance, improved customer experience, capacity upgrade and route clearance west to Plymouth”.

GWEP also picks up the ‘west outer’ portion of Crossrail and the project scope has to acknowledge that this is also a major civil engineering construction effort.

The project management has been allocated on an ‘area’ basis, with a full team on each. Priority is high as the new IEP trains will soon start arriving, facilitating cascades including HSTs to Scotland and multiple-units to the West Country.

Engineering development has played a significant, and not necessarily positive, role in the progress of the project. The decision to use Series 1 overhead line equipment has constrained physical progress, and design development and approvals have continued while construction was already under way, with final approval of the system now being anticipated towards the end of the current year.

Phased commissionings also made for a challenging timetable, with critical events needing to be interlinked with signalling scheme construction. Put simply, the signalling must be completed before the traction power is switched on!

The problems of consents had not been fully appreciated in the early stages. There were tremendous stakeholder issues to be taken into account with significant environmental and heritage concerns at sites like Bath Sydney Gardens and various Brunel-era bridges.

Preparation work for electrification - Sydney Gardens, Bath.


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Building a newly electrified railway, with its demand for large single-phase supplies, has been challenging for the electricity industry distribution network operators (DNOs). Over the project, there is a requirement for 229 DNO cable moves together with the required bulk electricity supply points.

However, there have been some successes to report. The Reading area works went well, with value engineering deeply embedded in the process. A major blockade at Bathampton went smoothly and the complex power supply situation referred to above is on target.

EGIPThe next presentation came from Mark Conway

and covered the Edinburgh - Glasgow Improvement Programme (EGIP). Mark repeated the very valid point that the scheme was a major civil engineering construction scheme and not just an electrification process. Major works include clearance and platform extension works and significant tunnel and bridgeworks, many of which have been covered in previous articles in Rail Engineer. The team is also looking at rolling forward future extensions to Stirling, Dunblane and Alloa.

The scheme benefited from clear objectives set out by Transport Scotland and a key output as completion for August 2016. There have been significant achievements so far, including track lowering in Winchburgh Tunnel using the novel ÖBB-PORR system for ballastless slab track, developed by PORR and ÖBB (Austrian Federal Railways).

Standards changes had required the raising of bridge parapets, a considerable job, and the need for significant cable diversions had been caused by platform lengthening works.

Electrification structure foundation piling has been undertaken using a Kirow crane, which has performed well when given its head, but the geology of the route has meant that there are a significant number of rock intrusions and therefore the need for special foundation designs.

The project is, of course, still work in progress and Mark emphasised some of the extremely complex works yet to be undertaken. A particular highlight was the work at Glasgow Queen Street station where the ÖBB-PORR system for slab track was again to be used, albeit with twice the scope of Winchburgh tunnel, allied to complete remodelling of the station throat.

The new wiring train is expected to be in use by the end of the year, although some 50% of the work will still be undertaken by conventional means.

Millerhill traction and rolling stock depot will be an allied project, and one that is starting later than anticipated due to the need to consult with the new Scotrail franchisee over its requirements.

North WestPaul Hodson spoke on the works underway in the North

West of England with electrification and the Northern Hub programme. His presentation was an excellent review of lessons learned which can also be applied to many of the current schemes under development and construction.

Harking back to the chief engineer’s comments earlier in the day, the lack of clear output specifications for the work had caused problems. Another challenge was similar to that on the Great Western - the acceptance of the Series 2 overhead line equipment while design and construction was already underway.

Among other challenges were the phasing of the work - staff working on a second phase while dealing with works arising from a previous phase caused a loss of production. The high use of agency staff was also questioned as it could affect continuity, and the level of scrutiny by the ORR (Office of Rail and Road) was also mentioned.

The North West electrification programme was the first new such project for many years, and this had also caused a loss of expertise to be exposed.

(Right and below) The first wires on EGIP.


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Technical presentationsA valuable element of the Network Rail Electrification

Conference series is the opportunity to hear from manufacturers and designers, and the September conference gave four providers the chance to tell their stories.

First to the rostrum was Siemens, and Therese Persson gave a fascinating insight into the system-wide electrification proposal for the Danish Railway system. This programme is covered in more detail elsewhere in this issue.

Second was ABB with its Rationalised Auto Transformer Scheme (RATS) for protection and automation of electrification distribution systems.

This was followed by Trevor Burden of FLI structures and its flexible pile cap system. Lastly, Rob Daffern and Noel Dolphin from Furrer and Frey brought the conference up-to-date on electrification contact systems equipment including the solid collector bar system.

There was also an illuminating item from Crossrail on knowledge transfer, reinforced by Rafi Oghoubian of Airbus Industrie giving an insight into how his industry runs knowledge management and how its processes could be applied in other industrial organisations.

OverviewYet again Network Rail organised a very successful

conference, which aimed to keep both its own staff and contractors up-to-date and aware of its policies and requirements in regard to electrification and associated works.

Although there was some uncertainty on the day regarding project continuity and completion, the good news was received from the government later in the week that the ‘pause’ was over and the industry could decide how it was going to tackle electrification of the UK network in the future.

While there will certainly be challenges ahead, electrification of the railway network is a vital task and the programme to catch up on years of underinvestment will give the industry the chance to demonstrate how it can rise to the occasion.


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The TransPennine electrification scheme has been revived from its temporary slumber. The announcement in September was a welcome one,

particularly for anyone who regularly commutes by Pacer between Manchester and Leeds.

By 2022, Network Rail plans to have electrified the entire route from Liverpool to Newcastle. Chunks of this have already been completed through the North West Electrification Programme (NWEP). Refreshed Class 319s began operating under wires between Manchester Airport and Liverpool Lime Street in March, made possible by the electrification of the line between Newton-le-Willows and Liverpool Lime Street, allowing electric trains to go as far as Manchester Victoria.

With the re-boring of Farnworth tunnel complete, the electrification of the line between Manchester and Bolton has also now reached a major milestone.

NWEP Phase 2Phase one between Manchester and Newton-le-

Willows was the first interoperable electrification project in the UK, throwing up new challenges around conformance. In a world of interoperability, common safety method, NoBos (notified bodies) and DeBos (designated bodies), getting any rail project authorised can be a costly and complicated business.

The Network Certification Body (NCB), an independent subsidiary of the Network Rail group, was created to support and enable the UK rail industry to get a better understanding of the legislation surrounding new infrastructure programmes.

NCB acted as the NoBo, DeBo and AB (assessment body) to achieve the UK’s first Energy Technical Specification for Interoperability (TSI) authorisation from the ORR for phase one.

In 2014, NCB was appointed to act as the NoBo, DeBo and AB for NWEP Phase 2 - Newton-le-Willows to Liverpool Lime Street and Huyton to Wigan. Its role was to compile the technical files and safety reports as required by the railway interoperability regulations and common safety method regulations, assessing both the design and construction of the project so it could achieve full safety certification.

The introduction of the Railways (Interoperability) Regulations 2011 in January 2012 requires all projects to comply to European standards on interoperability.

Alongside its role on NWEP Phase 2, NCB was also the provider of independent assessment services for the Borders Railway line which now links communities in the Scottish Borders and Midlothian to Edinburgh. NCB was involved from an early stage, developing assessment plans that eventually led to full authorisation for the project. In Issue 131 (September 2015), Network Rail’s project director for Borders talked about how the mixture of new and old infrastructure created numerous issues with TSIs on the project that had to be overcome.

Setting new standards(Above) North West electrification programme.(Right) Bowshank Tunnel


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J3824 - Advert - full page - Rail Engineer-v2-AW.pdf 1 13/11/2015 09:28

DemandEstablished in 2012 to provide conformity for certification of

infrastructure projects, NCB has been steadily growing its rail vehicle and plant team, resulting in a number of substantial contract wins. Its rail vehicle conformance team is also currently working with LORAM, Hitachi and CAF on new train projects in the UK.

NCB has been extending its credentials as a conformance certification body. Its capabilities now include Assessment Body (under CSM-RA) and Entity in Charge of Maintenance certification.

With major electrification programmes on the horizon, managing director James Collinson believes there will be no shortage of demand for NCB’s services.

“The prospects for our business look healthy,” said James. “By the end of 2017, we expect to have tripled the size of our business.

“But our success will be driven by our people and our engineers, a UK resource that is already scarce. With new technologies being introduced through projects such as ERTMS and the Digital Railway, demand for skilled people is very high.

“We’re continuing to recruit great engineers and competing for resource is healthy, but doing it on the scale needed to satisfy demand for large projects such as Digital Railway and HS2 could hurt the UK rail industry as a whole. So we are also strengthening our relationships with selected partners - such as AEGIS Engineering, Ricardo Rail and MMRA - and recognising that, in some cases, collaboration will be an essential part of delivering these larger projects for the UK.

“We’ve come a long way in a short space of time and the future looks bright for us and the rail industry.”

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Our experience cover all aspects railway distribution infrastructure including:• AC & DC substations,• 11kV , 22kV & 33kV HV switchgear,• Protection and control,• SCADA,• HV Cabling,• Earthing and bonding, • Transformers, • Modular substation construction.

Power Supply Projects are specialist Electrification and substation contractors and consultants. Service we can provide include: • Electrification and Power Consultancy

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(Above) North West electrification programme. (Right) Borders railway.


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Quality products for the modern overhead contact line

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A significant challenge facing the rail industry today is the mandate that all centrally funded government

infrastructure projects should be BIM Level 2 compliant by April 2016. Whilst the software tools used in the construction sector are quite mature and evolved, those currently utilised for linear projects such as rail electrification are still developing.

Due to the complex nature of BIM on linear projects, companies range from being rather progressed and having a mature set of processes and protocols to those still developing their information requirements. To help address this, and in anticipation of customer requirements, a team of Balfour Beatty engineers has devised a new software package known as RED (Railway Electrification Designer), which provides the ability to deliver BIM Level 2 in the rail industry electrification sector.

BIM Level 2BIM stands for Building Information Modelling.

In its simplest form it is the method, means and processes by which anyone can understand a

building, specifically a digital model of a building.

Level 0 is where designs are 2D, usually paper based and no collaboration occurs. Level 1 sees the introduction of some 3D modelling and sharing of data through a common data environment.

At Level 2, fully collaborative working is introduced, each party using its own individual 3D model and paying particular attention to how information is

exchanged and shared. These individual models can be assembled into a multi-disciplinary or federated model.

Mission BIMpossible

IAN HEAGUE, PETER EVANS & JON MERCER


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The challengesThe BIM Level 2 mandate generates the necessity for a

clear definition of BIM for rail, not just the acronym itself but the design change methodology it spawns - the shift from creating 2D ‘flat’ drawings to delivering ‘intelligent’ 3D models with attached information. The level of detail required in each model must be defined according to its type and, more specifically, what stage it’s at within the design lifecycle. The exchange of this information must also play a vital role in the whole design process; and it must be done in a common format that all parties can understand.

There is also a need to define BIM in relation to the provision of linear assets, as its foundations were laid in the vertical world of buildings. A building consists of easily definable spaces and the materials used to create them, floors, rooms, windows and furnishings.

Naturally, as the building design progresses, a whole host of information is generated, attached to a model and organised by spaces into what constitutes an asset - the building is the asset, singular and definable.

However, if the project is to electrify a stretch of railway, things get a little more complicated. There is more difficulty in defining assets along a 50km route of railway; is the whole 50km route the asset? If not, is it broken down into discipline-specific assets - track, signals, and civils? There are no floors, no rooms and arguably, in an OLE (Overhead Line Equipment) project, there is no easily and singularly definable asset.

Additionally, unlike the building market, there is no national BIM library for OLE, so all suppliers have to model and attach asset information to each component, which takes a significant amount of time. There are, therefore, additional challenges to overcome. How are 3D models drawn quickly and efficiently without the creation of a component library, and how is information attached to that 3D model easily?

There is a general consensus within the rail industry in relation to achieving BIM Level 2 - assets need to be defined, assets should be modelled in 3D and each asset should have the relevant information attached to it. One further step closer to the successful implementation of BIM is to look at BS1192. This British standard guides the industry on how to manage, collaborate and understand asset information. In fact, if parties can create 3D models, attach information to

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them and collaborate using these models in what is defined as the ‘common data environment’, they are well on the way to achieving BIM Level 2.

With this in mind, three engineers from Balfour Beatty Rail Engineering Technology Solutions, based in Balfour Beatty’s Electrification Design Hub at Alaska House in Liverpool, have, over the last 12 months, developed their own ground breaking BIM platform - RED (Railway Electrification Designer). RED is a stand-alone software application for Microsoft Windows™ that integrates with Bentley’s Microstation™ CAD package and it simply removes the 3D modelling and asset tagging challenges by automating and streamlining the OLE modelling process.

3D modelsRED can generate 3D solid OLE models in real-time,

enabling a significant reduction in 3D draughting time whilst maintaining engineering integrity and eliminating the need to draw 3D OLE components manually. By using RED, the time taken to create a complex OLE structure is significantly reduced compared to traditional methods. RED has been designed to be easy and intuitive to use, enabling rapid component creation. So, not only does it enable efficient working in 3D, it does so without the need to have an extensive library of pre-prepared components. Furthermore, if any adjustments are required, editing a 3D model using RED is easy as it permits modification to components without the need to completely redraw them.

RED promotes collaboration as it can be used in design meetings such as inter-disciplinary reviews and signal sighting reviews. Users can make OLE design changes on-screen, reducing iterations and making the process lean. RED is also configurable for each OLE project - it is designed to be fully configurable to comply with any relevant CAD standards.

Additionally, it is worth noting that 2D elevations (cross sections) and 2D plan views (layouts) are created in parallel as part of the 3D RED model. Each time an edit is made to the model, the changes are reflected in the 2D extractions. A single 3D RED model, where all the graphical and asset data exists, forms a singular model, a single source of truth.

Asset information and data captureRED utilises three significant technologies to address

asset data capture. The first piece of technology deals with track information - as each structure is created in 3D, RED automatically detects and applies ‘cant’ and ‘high rail’ data using the RED Track Detect System.

Secondly, RED is able to detect ground profile models and understand how these interact with foundations, enabling correct geospatial placement of OLE models.

Thirdly, RED dynamically attaches information to each 3D component as it's modelled. Currently, RED uses the Network Rail Ellipse data structure to organise asset information. However, RED is flexible enough to be configured for virtually any type of asset information required.

Importantly, information can be augmented and improved upon at each stage in the design life cycle. The supplier might add minor or indicative information at the preliminary or conceptual design phase but, as the model progresses through its life, more and more data may be added. This means that a RED model can be created at concept and the same model can be delivered to the client for virtualisation and 3D driver training at the end of a project.

Whilst RED has a robust, extensible and configurable data framework, where any and all information can be stored, the granularity of what data is required at each design stage remains undefined. When the industry decides on its requirements, RED can easily be adapted.

Information exchangeBIM Level 2 requires that data is exchanged between

parties and RED does this effortlessly as it has a built in export engine which allows all OLE and track data to be exported. Driven by user-editable templates, the system can export data to COBie (Construction Operations Building Information Exchange), IFC (Industry Foundation Class) or any other industry standard format. These exports can be transmitted alongside the model and satisfy the BIM Level 2 requirements for information exchange.

RED is a design package for OLE that is both CAD and BIM Level 2 compliant. It is compatible with major electronic document management systems, particularly Bentley ProjectWise™, and its model output is compatible with all major CAD packages. RED is a full life-cycle BIM design package and Balfour Beatty is committed to its continued development.

Ian Heague is principle engineer, Peter Evans is design engineer and Jon Mercer software engineer with Balfour Beatty Engineering Technology Solutions. The team can be contacted on 0151 529 7428. To learn more abut BIM in a railway environment, come to the Rail BIM Summit in London at the end of January - more details at www.railBIMsummit.com.


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The Year in Infrastructure 2015 Conference was billed as a global gathering of leading executives in the world of infrastructure design, construction, and operations. Organised every year by Bentley Systems, a leading global provider of software for advancing

infrastructure, the event attracts leading figures from the world of infrastructure design, construction, and operations. It features a series of presentations and interactive workshops exploring the intersection of technology and business drivers, and how they are shaping the future of infrastructure delivery and investment returns, spread over four days.

The 2015 conference took place recently in London, and it was a huge affair by UK standards, with over 110 media attendees, several hundred conference delegates and attendance at the awards dinner in the order of 600 people. Rail Engineer was there to find out what it was all about.

BIM, or CIM?For a good while now, Bentley Systems

has been providing software for the use of project teams including surveyors, engineers, architects, construction companies and more. The company offers a comprehensive range of products in the field of Building Information Management, or BIM. Given the commitment of the UK Government to mandate the use of Level 2 BIM for all projects with government funding in the next 12 months or so, Bentley Systems must be well placed to take advantage of these developments.

Confusingly, delegates were informed at the conference that, in the USA, everyone speaks of CIM rather than BIM- civils rather than buildings, that is. Despite this slight difference of approach, Bentley’s products are used for building works as well as civils ones, and there seem to be signs of convergence between the civils and buildings fields in the adoption of the philosophy of BIM/CIM.

An interesting aside in all this was the ‘Bentley Infrastructure 500 Top Owner’ list produced by the company. It gives some perspective to the UK’s place in the world to see that the top ranked infrastructure owner in this country is UK Highways, placed 7th in the world. BP is the UK’s next organisation on the list at 11th, Network Rail comes 29th and the MoD is immediately behind at 30th. The National Grid is only 58th in world ranking, and TfL just 86th.

The two big features of the conference were Bentley’s product update announcements, presented by CEO Greg Bentley and COO Malcolm Walter and their team, and the company’s ‘Be Inspired Awards 2015’. The awards finals were judged during the conference, with the announcement of the winners and prize presentations taking place at a dinner one evening.

Common CONNECTionThis year’s big product news, presented by

Greg Bentley, was the introduction of a new generation of its software, the CONNECT Edition. This provides a common software environment for project delivery. Bentley’s ProjectWise, MicroStation and Navigator software packages are now all generally available to users. These are cloud-based services which now link together seamlessly.

ProjectWise CONNECT Edition is a work sharing workhorse, which now enables complete collaboration across a project team enabling comprehensive project delivery.

MicroStation CONNECT Edition is an advancement of Bentley’s common modelling environment, giving unified support for design modelling, analytical modelling, construction modelling and modelling of reality.

Navigator CONNECT Edition allows the extension of the common connected experience from office based users out to users on site or in the field. Model-based visual reporting and issue resolution through ProjectWise are enabled by this application.

Comments from users such as Arup suggest that this new development by Bentley is expected to help them to extend their BIM capabilities by improving collaboration and communications across project teams, increasing productivity and reducing the room for errors.

Associated with the CONNECT Edition, which will be extended rapidly to include other products in the Bentley portfolio, is a cloud-based subscription program, giving access to Bentley products, services and apps. It also manages users’ subscriptions and accounts.

Other developmentsVarious other software systems have been

improved and updated, for example AECOsim Building Designer has been updated to include conceptioneering and optioneering, bringing together analytical and modelling design for the conceptual stages of projects. Other packages with new features include OpenPlant and OpenRoads.

A very exciting new development announced was the launch of ConceptCapture, the first release by Bentley of the Acute3D software that the company acquired earlier this year. ConceptCapture enables the easy production of high-resolution 3D models of almost anything, using just photographs taken with almost any digital camera. Obviously, the accuracy and definition of the model is affected by the number and quality of the photographs, but the use of expensive survey cameras is not required. The results can be very realistic, clear

A year in infrastructureBentley Systems’ 2015 conference

CHRIS PARKER


and geometrically very accurate. The software is ideal for use with photographs taken by UAVs (drones) as well as terrestrial and aerial cameras. Models of almost any size are feasible, right up to city scale.

The conference was shown an impressive example of a 3D model produced by Acute3D by taking images from a UAV of an electricity substation on the EDF network in France. By supplementing the UAV images with some taken at closer range with hand held cameras, the model was able to show details such as legible details of the manufacturer’s plates on equipment housings.

In association with ContextCapture, Bentley has introduced ContextCapture Centre for ‘grid computing power’ to reduce processing time for large models, able to handle 30 gigapixels of imagery and more.

UK successThe Bentley ‘Be Inspired Awards 2015’

attracted over 300 entries from all over the globe. There were 18 categories including ‘Rail & Transit’, the one likely to be of most interest to Rail Engineer readers. Congratulations go to London Underground, as the winning project in this category was its Bond Street to Baker Street tunnel remediation project - relining 215 metres of the tunnel whilst leaving the line open to traffic in normal operational hours (pictured below).

To achieve this, work had to be carried out in the very short overnight engineering window of only two and a half hours each night. In this time, the project team had to replace the existing 1970s segmental concrete tunnel lining, which was considered unsafe because of the ground conditions around it, with a spheroidal graphite iron one. The project used Bentley software including AECOsim Building Designer, Bentley Descartes, Bentley Pointools, Bentley Navigator and ProjectWise to create geospatially accurate, fully coordinated 3D and 4D models, enabling LU to realise an estimated saving of 15% on the project cost whilst completing it safely on time.

A second UK project was one of the other two finalists in the same category, this being a project for Network Rail. Track Access Services was tasked with undertaking a laser positional video survey for Crossrail West, which meant surveying the intensively trafficked railway west of London for Network Rail’s infrastructure improvement project between Paddington and Reading. A geo-tagged 3D point cloud was collected using a train-mounted Topcon IPS2 scanning rig together with a synchronised HD video. The data will be used to support the project’s design stages. Bentley’s ProjectWise and MicroStation were crucial to this £40,000 project which, it is estimated, saved 75% of the cost of producing the information by other means, and also completely avoided the need for anyone to go on track.

In the category Innovation in Asset Performance, the Network Rail LADS Programme was a finalist. The entry was unfortunate to be up against a great winning project from South Australia, involving the management of a water supply network by innovative means. Commiserations to Network Rail for missing out this time, as its project might well have won had it not encountered such great competition.

There was another British winner, however, this time in the category Innovation in Power Generation. MWH Global won this category with its entry - Tyseley Resource Recovery Centre. It might not be a rail project, but we rail people do know where Tyseley is!

Challenging timesAltogether the conference was a great few

days, with an incredible amount of information being thrown at delegates. This report is only able to give a very brief sketch of the whole week.

Talking exclusively with Greg Bentley, it is clear that he sees the UK as being ahead of the rest of the world in many aspects of the application of BIM. Crossrail is using BIM, amongst many other reasons, to enhance the supply chain and to encourage innovation. He added: “The UK rail requirements stress test what we create.”

Clearly, Greg sees the UK as challenging him and his company but, from what was displayed at this conference, Bentley as a company is challenging the rail industry to find new and innovative uses for its software and BIM in general.

Stéphane Côté, research director and Bentley Fellow.

Greg Bentley.


From time to time, new concepts come along that the latest generation of engineers grasp with both hands but which others, frankly, struggle to comprehend. Often, it’s all about the way people were trained to think, and

how quickly they can shed that programming and absorb the new ideas.

Yards (or even chains!) and metres, shillings and ‘new pence’, pounds and kilos, acres and hectares - anyone over the age of 40 will understand the difficulties.

Now we have BIM - Building Information Modelling - which is not only new but becomes compulsory at Level 2 for all government-funded contracts after April 2016.

But what is it? And what does it do? And why is it so important? And what do companies need to do to be ready?

All good questions, and good reasons why the recent Rail BIM Summit, organised by Rail Media and hosted by Addleshaw Goddard near the Barbican in London, was sold out. There is even talk of another one in January for all the disappointed people who couldn’t get in.

BIM breakfastThe day began early for those able

to attend the breakfast session at 8.30 am - ‘BIM Basics’ presented by Paul Trethewey, engineering data (BIM) manager and Andy Powell, head of BIM, with WSP/Parsons Brinckerhoff. This covered the origins of BIM, BIM today and the aspirations of BIM.

Starting, naturally, with the origins of BIM, the presenters began with a quotation from Peter Hansford, chief construction adviser to the UK Government: ”The term BIM doesn’t matter at all. What we are talking about is the use of digital technology in design, construction and whole life asset management.”

A key driver in almost any field of life today is the exponential growth of computing power. The result of this is disruptive change, since it means we have the ability to use computer technology in ways we didn’t dream of only a few years ago.

This affects almost everything we do. In construction, it means that we are now able to use digital technology in the way Peter described, in order to deliver greatly improved whole life performance from our assets.

In considering where BIM is today, Network Rail was taken as an example as it is the largest private landowner in the UK, the country’s largest purchaser of electricity and the owner of the third largest telecommunications network.

The company is building appropriate asset information and management systems and the presenters looked quickly at the workflows and tools involved, the challenges and strategies and the BIM execution plan. Network Rail is using a geographical information system (GIS)

Baffled byCHRIS PARKER BIM?

David Philp of AECOM chaired the main session.


- esiARCGIS, an engineering data management system - ProjectWise Explorer V8i, a document management system and object modelling to accomplish this task.

Future aspirations for BIM described in the final section of the presentation included sustainability, achieved through such results as the avoidance of re-work and the ability to reuse models. Occupational health enhancement, another aspiration, should be achievable through, for example, the reduction of the need for human involvement in hazardous activities, and via improved results achieved by the use of modelling.

In rail and other passenger transport businesses, the passenger experience should be improved through information management processes and mobile device software apps supported by BIM. Other aspirations include reality capture and rule driven design, streamlining projects and asset management.

The BIM challengeAfter a much-needed coffee, the BIM

newcomers from the breakfast session were joined by those ‘already knowledgeable’ for the rest of the day. David Philp, AECOM director of BIM opened with a welcome address which echoed the earlier talk by considering why BIM is needed, what it is and what are its key components. In David’s words, BIM is “the act of creating an information model”. He suggested

that BIM is needed because we need digital data for (rail) assets from which we can derive asset management information.

The Government clearly thinks so too, and as already mentioned, they have mandated the use of collaborative 3D BIM on all projects funded centrally by government from 4th April next year. To support this they will be ensuring the provision of a clear and complete EIR (employer’s information requirement) with every contract from the deadline date.

David described the standard information exchange method, COBie, mandated by British Standards for all projects where no asset management system (AMS) already exists.

Other BIM Level 2 components include AIR (asset information requirements), AIM (asset information management), and the whole should result in integrated project delivery, integrated and comprehensive asset information management and lean solutions for project delivery and asset management.

In rail, the aspiration is for a digital built rail environment comprising an AIM and AMS, driving asset management, asset renewal and asset project delivery, with asset changes fed back into the AIM and AMS automatically, of course. The vision is that this will lead to a 33% reduction in costs, 50% lower emissions and greater productivity and export success from

BIMSummit

®

BIM Summit hosted by

After a sell out event, the Rail BIM Summitwill be returning in January 2016…

WHERE BIM MEETS RAIL

To register your interest in the event contact [email protected]

I thought this was a great event,

a good mix of delegates and speakers.

It was a good day. I enjoyed the

other presentations and great to see so many

people engaged in a Rail specifi c BIM

event.‘ ‘


the construction industry in the UK. However, it is important to remember that design and construction typically account for only 20% of the total spend on assets, with operation and maintenance accounting for the remaining 80%. This is why the longer term vision for BIM will extend its influence into those phases of asset management, to ensure minimised whole life costs and optimised asset performance in service.

BIM and existing infrastructureBarry Gleeson, Network Rail Survey Assurance

Manager, Thameslink, began by asking: “Where’s the as-built and who cares?” There is much to do if the railway is to achieve the full asset information it needs. It must not end up emulating the recent French experience, where two classes of new trains were found to clash with many platforms across the network, resulting in hurried, extensive and expensive infrastructure alterations. The industry has to know what and where its assets are, and maintain that asset information accurately through any changes that may be made to them at any time.

Barry continued by describing some of the problems he has experienced in the past with railway asset information collection and recording. He covered the RINM (rail infrastructure network model) that Network Rail is building and discussed its use at London Bridge.

“It’s all about recording, verifying and communicating data and information,” Barry commented. The way in which this is done is changing rapidly. Scanned data has been used for data collection for some time now, and the use of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) is increasing. BIM is being geo-enabled, and video information is being combined with the BIM data.

BIM on a new railwayHS2 director of BIM, John Kerby, looked at how

BIM could be used when building a new railway. He quoted HS2 technical director, Andrew McNaughton: “BIM is our life blood,... our central nervous system.” HS2 depends upon BIM to deliver the quality of the railway, the quality of passenger experience and the quality of the business. It will enable the realisation of the full value of the physical assets by the exploitation of the full value of the digital assets in the BIM model.

The company has a target to deliver savings through BIM of £0.5 billion and is mapping direct and indirect benefits in order to be able to demonstrate these. The asset register, network model and asset management systems are critical.

There are challenges in this. In procurement it is essential to include the necessary details in contracts, and initially level 2 BIM is being written into these. The intention is to move from this later to level 3 and finally level 4, at which time BIM will extend to cover the whole of operations and maintenance.

This brought John to the question of specification versus innovation. HS2 is determined to specify what and when rather than how or who by developing a common data environment (CDE) and providing this to the supply chain together with robust EIR (employer’s information requirements). The aspiration is to allow maximum room for innovation whilst ensuring compatibility across the piece, irrespective of supplier.

BIM advances the railwayBen Feltham, head of BIM for rail at Skanska,

and Matt Blackwell, digital operations director with Costain, represented the Costain Skanska Joint Venture (CSJV). Ben began, taking a look at BIM in rail.

Thameslink was an early adopter of the BIM process and he used this project as an exemplar of what has already been done. BIM in rail, as elsewhere, involves collaboration and modelling, and this is becoming established good practice in the industry. Ben considered it unfair that the industry so often gets unfairly criticised for being old-fashioned.

BIM has been vital to the Paddington CSJV project, where a BIM Clinic was set up to support the project team by offering training and facilities to anyone from the project. On Thameslink, the JV has successfully used 4D modelling to assist its project delivery, for example on the Bermondsey dive-under project. And cloud-based technology is valuable, witness the use of EMT (enable my team) on the Crossrail project.

Matt Blackwell took over to discuss the Great Western electrification project, explaining how environmental and stakeholder management are facilitated by digitising assets and adding them to a map. This information is freely available and can be taken around on mobile devices. Mapped data can be used to make predictive information, for example the traffic consequences of closing a bridge to traffic.

Bernard Fanning, Network Rail, gave an overview of Crossrail 2 which will connect south-west London with the north-east of the city, then carried on to describe how the project team is applying BIM to the development of the project. He, too, asked: “What is BIM?”

“It consists of drawings, models, and more models,” he supplied his own answer, adding that it is essential to think about the desired end product and feed this view back into the ‘recipe’ or ‘ingredients’ stage of BIM development. The vision must be linked to the business case and lead into an implementation plan. On completion, lessons learned should be fed back to drive behavioural change and future improvement.

Bernard Fanning of Network Rail spoke

on Crossrail 2.


Existing AIMRichard Cooper from Bridgeway Consulting

recalled how track geometry data used to be collected by the Hallade Method, which involved three people, a string line and a ruler! Today, things have moved on via total stations, to laser scanning, and now UAVs.

However, why is the take-up of BIM so slow? Richard considered that the answer to that question includes fear of the unknown, concern about the costs and competence issues associated with adopting new equipment and technologies, the difficulty of getting from data collection to data collaboration, and finally a concern that BIM is too big a concept for smaller surveying companies.

Richard’s colleague Simon Hatch took over at this point to speak about modelling of existing assets. BIM is being used to supplement the rail industry, he said, by integrating what he called ‘siloed data’ from different sources within the industry. Clients need to think what they need and why, and develop their EIR to suit their purposes. Consultants such as Bridgeway can assist with this.

CBIANeil Pawsey of software and systems provider

Bentley Systems described how the technical complexity of the Crossrail project, and the sheer number of contracts involved, mean that the risks are significant. BIM is a key means to minimise these risks, and the Crossrail BIM strategy included the Crossrail Bentley Information Academy (CBIA). Hosted by Bentley Systems, its purpose is to enhance supply chain knowledge, and also to drive innovation in construction.

The curriculum is defined by Crossrail and its chief executive, Andrew Wostenholme, is enthusiastic about BIM and has driven it throughout the life of the project from the earliest days.

The impact and benefits of the Academy have been great and wide ranging. It has helped to educate the supply chain, assisting them to understand why asset information and modelling are critically important to the project. It has allowed first class coaching and training of people from all levels of the project.

Malcolm Taylor is head of technical information at the Crossrail project. He stressed that information must meet the required standards, be appropriately structured, asset focussed and appropriate to the asset life cycle. Its storage must be considered as well as its collection, and there needs to be a common data environment to ensure compatibility and consistency.

Asset information must be complete, accurate and up to date. For example, no asset may be changed without that change being recorded correctly in the system immediately. That applies whoever makes the change, whether a maintenance team or a renewals project.

Data handling must be optimised, and the use of a common data environment (CDE) is essential for this. Then it becomes simple to hand over the data from Capex (the development project) to Opex (the operations and maintenance team). ‘Playlists’ can be created for different users, to ensure that each gets the data they need. Crossrail has over a million separate assets that will be tagged, and has already generated over 2 million e-documents thus far. Without its systems this volume of data would be impossible to manage efficiently and effectively.

Adapting to BIMOlly Thomas of BIM Technologies stated: “BIM

won’t wait for you and you shouldn’t wait for it.” Clients need to think what they need and want, taking appropriate expert advice where required. People are critical, and separate teams for design, construction and so on are not good enough. A project must have an integrated project team.

Steve Eglinton, director of GeoEnable began his presentation by reiterating that whole life cost matters, not just the Capex cost. Delivery of the lowest whole life cost requires collaboration and the integration of systems, disciplines, organisations and data formats. Good data management and use adds value, turning data into information, intelligence and, ultimately, knowledge.

People are essential in all this, so where will the rail industry find them? They may come from many different backgrounds such as the ICE, RICS, IStructE and more. Rail could look in other sectors besides its own and needs to avoid the jargon and acronyms that inhibit essential cross-discipline collaboration.

Benefits of BIMIt seemed appropriate that the final

presentation of the day, given by Matthew Conway of OSL Rail and Matt Lees of BIMevoke, looked at this subject.

Matthew began by reminding delegates that the rail sector is not alone and doesn’t have a monopoly of problems or solutions. Similar issues run across all sectors, so it is crucial to learn from others where possible. He considered the vision, philosophy and mission of BIM (or visual design and construct as he preferred it), before going on to enumerate the benefits he saw from BIM. These include efficiency throughout the life of a project and integration of the design approach, improved safety, more adaptability and improved sustainability.

Matt Lees concluded the presentation with a discussion of a real world example his company had been involved in, the Liverpool waste water scheme. BIMevoke had worked with AECOM and Atkins on this, using Autodesk BIM 360 Field. The contractor, Costain, had provided its staff with iPads, enabling them to access information and upload new data directly from site.

That concluded a fascinated, and lengthy, look at the world of BIM in Rail. Everyone present was convinced of the need to implement BIM in one form or another, and of the benefits that would result. The Government’s target of Level 2 on all projects from April 2016 seemed to be challenging but achievable.

However, as HS2’s John Kerby commented, the real challenge was to engage with all the people who weren’t there on the day, as they were the ones who were not yet on board with the drive to implement BIM throughout the rail industry.

Richard Cooper, Bridgeway.


DAVID SHIRRES

Wheel countingin Vienna

Railway track experiences all the climatic extremes the planet can throw at it. It is also subject to heavy loads, vibration, pollution and electromagnetic interference. This is not the ideal environment for

an exposed electrical circuit that is a safety-critical element of the signalling system.

That said, track circuits are generally highly reliable but, when they fail, this is usually due to environmental conditions completing the circuit. As the system fails safe, there is no safety risk but such failures have a high service impact. This is one of the reasons that axle counters are increasingly popular and are now the train detection system of choice for Network Rail.

This much was apparent from the recent 2015 Wheel Detection Forum in Vienna, which was a three-day event attended by over 200 delegates from 34 countries. This was the third such forum, a bi-annual event organised by the Austrian company, Frauscher Sensortechnik GmbH. However, this was not immediately apparent, as its focus was the benefits of axle counters, rather than its own products.

Keynote speakersWith the exception of Wabtec’s

Dwayne Allan, the opening keynote speakers said little about axle counters. Dwayne’s presentation concerned axle counters in Australia and New Zealand where they were introduced in the 1980s. Their early use was on ‘long skinny railways’ as, unlike track circuits, there is no restriction on signal section length if axle counters are used. Other advantages of axle counters were the removal of insulated rail joints and the ability to alter signalling functionality during infrastructure upgrades.

Presentations on the project management challenges of installing railway infrastructure in the 57km Gotthard Base Tunnel and the expansion of Turkish railways were fascinating. As far as track circuits were concerned, the Forum learnt

that the new Gotthard tunnel used Thales axle counters and that in Turkey there was a mix of detection systems, with track circuits presenting the greatest reliability issue.

Max Schubert of DB Mobility Networks Logistics explained how Fibre Optic Sensing (FOS) detects wheels and anything else along the infrastructure causing ground vibration. This may be quite tiny, for example a human footstep.

FOS measures changes in reflected light from micro deformations in a calibrated fibre that typically can provide a ‘microphone’ every 10 metres over a 40km length. With fibre cables commonplace along the infrastructure, FOS can make use of spare fibres without the cost of additional infrastructure.

The FOS technique is being evaluated on a 33km section of high-speed line in Germany. This has identified 27 potential applications, one of which is timely


station announcements of trains approaching at over 160km/h. Initial results indicate that FOS can fulfil this requirement. Although it is not certain whether FOS can be developed to the safety integrity level required by signalling systems, this trial shows its potential for other applications in the near future. In Britain, FOS is now used to detect rocks falling onto the Oban line from the steep slopes of Ben Cruachan.

Axle counter systemFor signalling, the axle counter

system consists of the wheel sensor, axle counters and communication with the signalling interlocking. Modern wheel sensors are mounted on the inner face of the rail below flange height. They have two upward facing magnetic coils. Wheels are detected when the voltage of the alternating current in the coils is suppressed as a wheel flange passes over them.

This is not the simple piece of kit it might be thought to be. The coils need to be immune to electromagnetic interference, for which Frauscher has developed the V.Mix technology.

This combines three inductive processes (inductivity, field deflection and eddy current/ hysteresis) to increase the sensor’s resistance to electromagnetic interference, linear eddy current brakes and electromagnetic rail brakes. Coils also have to operate consistently between -40°C and 100°C, despite significant changes to the conductivity and permeability of the coils’ iron cores over this temperature range.

The axle counter is the electronics that interprets the wheel sensor output. To do this, the counter’s evaluation board (EB) converts analogue signals from the wheel

sensor coils to a digital pulse. As well as counting the number of axles over the sensor, the EB also detects direction and speed by comparing signals from the two wheel sensor coils. It also has a logic circuit that counts axles in and out of each signal section to determine whether the section is occupied or clear.

The axle counter unit also incorporates a power supply with over-voltage protection. If not directly wired to the interlocking, it also has a communications board to transmit clear/occupied section data and receive requests for resets.

Resets may be required as axle counters, unlike track circuits, do not continuously detect trains. Instead, they use logic to determine whether a section is clear using data from individual wheel sensors. When normal operation is disturbed, for example by equipment failure or engineering

work, the normal logic does not apply and a potentially disruptive system reset is required.

Automatic resetThe Frauscher FAdC axle counter

system has a high availability as it is designed to largely eliminate such disruptive resets without compromising safety. As Phil Blacker of Atkins explained, this approach assumes that trains cannot fly or materialise out of nowhere.

The FAdC system offers two ways of doing this: counting head control or supervisor track sections. The basis of counting head control is that, as the axle counter system knows where trains are, it also knows when a train is approaching a wheel sensor. Hence, it can identify wheel sensor signals that are not trains, for example maintenance trollies.

Supervisor track sections are two adjacent track sections. If there is an abnormal operation of the middle wheel sensor, the sensors at each end of the supervisor section will still count the same number of axles into and out of the larger section. The supervisor track sections overlap so that each track section is part of two of them. If there is a track section fault, the sensor concerned can be automatically reset provided one of its supervisor track sections is clear.

UK standards do not yet allow for axle counter resets using counting head control and supervisor track sections. However, use of these

Frauscher’s RSR123 Wheel Detector.

Wheel profile camera and laser unit requires exact detection of wheel location.


techniques to improve axle counter availability is being actively progressed and has attracted worldwide interest.

Monsoons, lightning and pythonsThe forum heard how monsoon

floods, frequent lightning strikes and pythons climbing up overhead line masts affect tropical railways.

Whilst pythons are not a problem for the UK, floods are. Lightning strikes are also not unknown. Anthony Darama Rajan, signalling manager for Kuala Lumpur’s 59km airport link, advised that Malaysia has up to 250 thunderstorm days a year. He explained how axle counters had proved resilient to the flooding and made a significant contribution to the air link’s 99.83% on-time service performance, once wheel

sensor earthing had been modified to prevent wheel sensor damage from frequent lighting strikes.

Flooding is an inevitable consequence of Mumbai’s monsoons, as illustrated by Sanjay Singh, S&T general manager of Mumbai Railway. His presentation showed packed trains running whilst water was at rail height as wheel sensors continued to function. With 7.6 million passengers a day on its 319 km suburban network, reliability of Mumbai’s signalling equipment is crucial. In 2012, Frauscher provided 1,900 counting heads and 1,400 track sections to upgrade this system.

Sanjay explained that, in addition to the sensor’s high environmental resilience, Mumbai’s railways achieve high signalling availability by using

supervisor track sections, counting head control and redundancy from overlaying axle counters on track circuits.

This arrangement allows combined Counting Head Control and trolley suppression track circuits to avoid resets from use of maintenance trollies. Trolley suppression track circuits do not detect trolleys as they have insulated axles. Using Counting Head Control, the wheel sensor will ignore the two axles of trollies if the adjacent track sections or trolley suppression track circuits are clear. In case the track circuit gets occupied by the passing of another vehicle, the connected wheel sensor gets activated and following sections detect passing trains.

Ethernet communicationVarious speakers mentioned

the advantages of a decentralised architecture, made possible by modern transmission technologies. This presents security and reliability issues for which the Frauscher Safe Ethernet protocol has been developed as an option for system integrators who do not have their own protocol.

Providing the required software interface to exchange data between the axle counter and higher-level systems, this protocol also transmits data for diagnostics and centralised remote monitoring.

An example of such decentralised architecture is the modular signalling installed between Crewe and

Wheel detectors continue to operate in Bombay’s monsoon rains.



Shrewsbury in 2011 by Siemens, the first such system commissioned by Network Rail. This required 79 wheel sensors with the Frauscher FAdC axle counting system installed in 19 external cabinets. Communication between these cabinets and the Westrace interlocking is through an Ethernet connection using duplicated fibre optic cables.

Data transmission between axle counters and signalling interlocking by open Ethernet networks over a radio network also offers significant installation savings by eliminating cable routes. This does, however, present the challenge of providing a power supply for the wheel sensor. It seems this is not an issue for countries like Australia where the sun always shines on the sensor’s solar panels.

Level crossingsSpeaking by Skype from India,

Petchimuthu Gopalakrishnan advised how India’s 40,445 level crossings account for 44% of the country’s railway accidents. He referred to the advantages of axle counters for train detection.

In particular, he thought mass violations of level crossing rules by vehicle drivers would reduce if crossings did not have excessive warning times. In this respect, the easy adjustment of wheel sensors location was useful.

In Europe, level crossings account for 29% of all railway fatalities. José Fonseca of the Portuguese company EFACEC and Laurenz Trunner of the Austrian company EBE solutions are both

concerned with the manufacture and installation of level crossing systems for which they offered the forum similar insights.

They both considered axle counters to be a more reliable and flexible solution than track circuits or treadles, an important consideration when railways have differing crossing detection requirements. They also noted that axle counters made it easier to optimise crossing warning times. Unlike track circuits, axle counters are not affected by rusty rails at crossings with few rail movements.

Ethernet-based communication reduced installation costs, allowed for remote monitoring of multiple crossings and supported integration with signalling and road traffic systems as required.

José Fonseca noted that EFACEC’s previous use of track circuits resulted in, typically, one defect per year per crossing. Since axle counters were introduced there had been virtually no failures.

Oiling the wheelsPresentations by America’s

BNSF Railway, Progress Rail, Hegenscheidt and LORAM made it clear that large numbers of wheel sensors are used in non-signalling applications. For such use, Frauscher recently launched a stand-alone wheel sensor with an open analogue interface allowing it to be used with a wide variety of equipment.

Vennie Dyavanapali of LORAM estimated that, in North America, track lubrication systems use an estimated 25,000 wheel sensors

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of which around 90% are in yards with the remainder on the main line. Since 1900, flange lubricators have reduced the coefficient of friction at the gauge-face, typically to 0.05. Top-of-rail lubrication has been used in yards since 1995 and on the main line since 2005. This accommodates wheel speed differences on curves by applying a friction modifier to give a coefficient of friction of typically 0.3.

Wheel sensors ensure the correct amount of lubricant is applied. For top-of-rail lubrication, they also ensure lubricant is not applied until the locomotive has passed.

Axle counters monitor lubricant consumption and are used for billing. In yards, wheel sensors also control wagon speed, determine car location, detect stalled cars and activate wayside equipment such as scales and wheel cleaners.

Vennie noted that, for track maintenance, wheel sensors needed to be installed and calibrated in less than two minutes. They also needed a very low power draw, to be immune from AC interference, and to have wireless capabilities. Frauscher wheel sensors meet these requirements. In particular, with no requirement to drill the rail, sensors can be quickly installed as they are mounted using a rail claw.

Automated train monitoringHark Braren of BNSF provided

another North American perspective with his presentation on the use of trackside equipment to prevent wagon derailments. This equipment

uses various sensors, generally at common monitoring stations. Bearings are monitored by acoustic sensors and hot bearing monitors that measure surface temperature. A wheel impact detector measures flats and other wheel defects.

Vision Monitoring assesses bogie geometry for worn wheels and poor steering as well as broken springs and friction wedges. It also identifies missing fasteners, broken welds, damaged structural components, defective couplers, low air hoses and wheel tread defects. Accurate wheel detection is an essential part of these monitoring stations, both to trigger the monitoring equipment and specify the location of any train defects.

Progress Rail, Germany, has developed a vehicle monitoring checkpoint for use before tunnels. This detects dragging equipment, out of gauge loads and has hotbox detectors. Throughout Europe, around 1,200 FUES hot box detectors are in use, including 145 in the UK. These monitor external and internal bearings, wheels and brake temperatures. They require accurate wheel sensors to trigger the temperature sensors and provide data on speed and direction.

Wheel lathe company Hegenscheidt has developed its ARGUS II system to monitor wheels using various sensors to detect cracks and measure the diameter, roundness and wheel profile. This is done at up to 15km/h in a depot monitoring station that also identifies

the train by, for example, transponders or optical character recognition. The results are stored on a database and used to assess wheel life and time to the next wheel turning. Accurate wheel sensors are an essential part of this system as the monitoring cameras and lasers need to be triggered at exactly the correct point.

Hegenscheidt’s Peter Neumann stated that this system is to be developed for main line use at speeds up to 100km/h. For this, the Frauscher wheel sensor triggers when the dip voltage of its two coils is equal. Initial results are that, at speeds between 40 and 60km/h, wheels of 513 and 755 mm diameter can be detected within ranges respectively of 5.2 and 3.2 mm. As this was not sufficiently accurate, further development work is being done.

Far and wideThe 2015 Wheel Detection Forum

certainly offered wide-ranging presentations. Many had travelled far to attend it. No doubt, they found it worth their intercontinental journeys. This worldwide spread of delegates was a reflection of the installation of over 100,000 Frauscher wheel sensors in 70 countries, giving the company a market share of around 40%.

It was clear that axle counters offer significant benefits, so wheel sensors installations are likely to have significantly increased by the next Wheel Detection Forum, in 2017. It will be interesting to see what this next Forum has to offer.



Most of us probably haven’t tried it, but driving a tram along busy inner-city streets can’t be the easiest of jobs. Sometimes it’s hard enough in a road vehicle. Other drivers just seem to do the daftest things, don’t they? Stopping dead for no reason, jumping the lights,

pulling out without warning, doors being flung open - it’s all a bit tricky. And at the same time there are all those pedestrians and cyclists weaving about.

Every tram driver is equipped with the highly effective Mk I eyeball of course, and light rail vehicles do have very effective braking systems, but what if the driver is distracted for a moment?

Let’s not overplay it - light rail is a very safe means of transport. In fact, a 2009 report by the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) showed that accidents per kilometre are more than four times lower for trams than for cars. Safety remains a top priority for operators, but even so, driving a tram on sight for a whole shift can be challenging, especially at night or during poor weather.

A study in Hannover undertaken from 2005 to 2010 revealed a significant rise in the number of collisions. These involved impacts with road vehicles, other trams and with buffer stops. In Hannover alone the cost of accidents involving light rail vehicles is estimated to have been €6 million over the past ten years.

Early warningDriver assistance systems (DAS) that can

provide early warnings to drivers are one way to try to reduce traffic accidents. Indeed, some vehicles now on our roads use them for distance warning or collision avoidance. It hasn’t been very affordable until recently, though, to develop them specifically for light rail use due to the relatively low volume. However, interest is growing and requirements for their introduction are becoming clearer. Because their operating environment is partially unsegregated from other forms of transport, trams and light rail

vehicles are emerging as a key field for the application of DAS.

Now Bosch Engineering Group has developed a new ‘Forward Collision Warning’ system for light rail vehicles that combines a radar sensor with a video sensor to detect cars, buses, nearby rail vehicles and other obstacles on the tracks. The idea is to use the system to identify potential accident situations and give drivers reliable warnings of dangerous situations. This should increase safety, prevent downtime and avoid accident-related costs.

Cost effectiveTaking into account the annual repair costs

of collisions, it has been calculated that a DAS installation could pay for itself within just two years. The systems work by alerting drivers to potential collisions, allowing them to gain precious reaction time. According to data provided by Stephan Lewisch, leader of the UITP

group on safety in light rail, it is estimated that the braking distance can be reduced by 20% to 40%. As well as providing alerts for obstacle detection and collision avoidance the DAS systems can also prevent driver errors, such as over-speeding and SPAD (signal passed at danger) incidents.

In developing DAS systems there has been collaboration between operators and suppliers. This has been especially important to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of the human machine interface. If the system is not designed properly there is a danger that false or unnecessary alerts could either confuse or irritate drivers instead of providing support.

The Bosch Forward Collision Warning system has been trialled in Frankfurt by tram operators Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt am Main (VGF) and in Hannover by üstra Hannoversche Verkehrsbetriebe AG (üstra).

Both operators had started looking into the potential of DAS in 2012. A feasibility study was successfully completed in the summer of 2013 and Bosch, VGF and üstra agreed to cooperate. Field testing of the Bosch Forward Collision Warning system in vehicles for passenger service began at the start of 2014.

STUART MARSH

L king Ahead

Bosch multipurpose camera.

Rail Engineer • December 201574LI

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Double visionSimultaneously, an alternative system based on the use of stereo

cameras was tested by VGF in Frankfurt. Bombardier, together with research partner AIT (Austrian Institute of Technology), has produced a DAS based on a specially-developed optical 3D sensor system. The device has a set of three video cameras of high spatial resolution mounted at the top of the windscreen. One camera recognises the rails and a stereoscopic pair can detect and range any object that might foul the envelope of the vehicle.

Both VGF and üstra have decided to go forward with the Bosch system. However, following successful testing in passenger service, the Frankfurt Transport Authority has also decided to equip 74 bi-directional Flexity vehicles with 148 of the Bombardier driver assistance systems while the Bosch system will operate on the 38 Siemens R-vehicles.

Data from the trials has helped Bosch Engineering with further refinement of its system in preparation for the start of series production from the end of 2015.

AlertIt became apparent at an early stage that DAS hardware used in

the automotive sector could be applied to light rail, albeit with some modifications. Bosch has made use of pre-existing automotive technology by using a radar sensor to detect the movement of road and rail vehicles, and the presence of obstacles on the tracks ahead.

In the light rail system, a video camera is used in addition to detect the rails and thus the path that the tram will take. A high-performance rail control unit running application-specific software calculates the trajectories and speeds of the detected objects relative to the tram’s own speed and predicted path. Within defined parameters, the potential for a collision will cause a driver alert to be raised. If the system detects that an object is coming dangerously close, or that the vehicle needs to brake to avoid an object in its path, it gives the driver a visual and acoustic warning.

The precise nature of the alert can be user defined, but in the trials it was found that combining a sounder with one or two lights was effective. Taking into consideration the speed of the light rail vehicle, one light illuminates for far objects and two lights if more urgent action is needed. The nature of the alert therefore enables the driver to make decisions about braking early enough to avoid a possible collision.

ReturnsThe radar operates on a frequency of 76-77 GHz and has a beam

spread of 70°. The effective radar range is 160-metres, but only information from the first 80-metres is used. Beyond that distance, it is thought that there are too many variables for reliable predictions to be made. Bosch Engineering recognised that false or unnecessary alerts could very much dilute the effectiveness of the system. It needs to provide valuable assistance to the driver, rather than being an annoyance.

For this reason, the system ignores radar returns from moving pedestrians - human behaviour is deemed to be just too unpredictable! Interpretation of the radar returns is software defined and can be tailored to suit specific requirements.

During the trials, the radar scanner was mounted externally, immediately above the front coupler, as it had been found that there was too much attenuation of the microwave RF signal by the carbon fibre body panelling for the scanner to be mounted inboard. The video camera was mounted behind the windscreen. Production versions will have these items mounted either as a retro-fit kit, or incorporated into the design of new vehicles.

Radar scanner.

Rail Engineer • December 2015 75LIGHT RAIL/M

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The Bosch system has been well received by both VGF and üstra. “It is already clear that we are at the beginning of a promising technical innovation to increase the safety of railway and especially LRT systems,” commented Michael Rüffer, head of rail operations and safety manager at VGF. “We chose the Bosch camera-radar combination because it was important for us to know that the components are taken from large-scale automotive production. Now we are working together to refine the system in our prototypes, applying the know-how and experience of our tram driving instructors.”

As part of this process, VGF is optimising the functions of the system so that they support the drivers in every situation to avoid collisions and accidents.

Driverless trams?It has been legally possible in Germany for the

driver assistance systems to be trialled on light rail passenger vehicles in the busy city streets of Frankfurt and Hannover because they don’t affect the principle of driving on sight - the driver is always ‘in charge’. With further technical progress anticipated within the automotive sector, particularly through the development of driverless cars, the question inevitably arises as to whether we can expect driverless trams in the future.

Currently, DAS activation will generate vigilance warnings and can lead to the automatic activation of any safety device such as applying the service brake or sounding an internal warning or the external horn. In the VGF

prototype, DAS activates the loop of the driver’s safety device, but this can be over-ridden within two seconds by depressing a button on the master controller. If driver intervention doesn’t take place within that time, a safety braking sequence (as opposed to emergency braking) is initiated. This system is in effect a query of the driver’s vigilance.

The integration of the driver assistance system into the loop of the driver’s safety device makes it simpler to implement DAS braking into existing vehicles. In new vehicles, DAS could easily be integrated into the vehicle control software. This would allow the implementation of speed limitation, interruption of the traction power, activation of different braking systems and, of course, the generation of optical/acoustic warnings.

It would be possible for further developments to increasingly take control away from drivers, but the recommended strategy seems to be to take a step-by-step approach. In any case, without segregation from other traffic, moves towards a high level of automation would require a radical change in the legal environment.

In the meantime, Forward Collision Warning has proved its worth to VGF and üstra and now looks set for wider adoption. The technology is readily available and has become commercially attractive, so it’s highly possible that it could become an industry standard before long. Its adoption and the realisation of its further potential might even be providing us with a vision of what the future holds for light rail operation in our city centres.

The camera system detects the rails.


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In June 2015 Bombardier Transportation handed over the 100th tram to Transport for Greater

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©TfGM, Lesley Chalmers

Trams are great people movers. After an early boom, many systems around the world were removed and replaced by buses, but that trend is being reversed in many cities, while others never lost their beloved

trams.

However, while the tracks can be buried in the city streets, there is still the problem of what to do with the wires. They are unsightly, particularly when crossing a historic city square when poles have to be installed to support them.

So the major manufacturers have come up with various ways of removing the wires (issue 98, December 2012). Induction loops buried in the road is the most discrete - there is nothing to see at all, but a flush-mounted third rail and overhead charging stations at tram stops with no wires in between have all been tried and adopted for a few installations.

Now, another milestone in the development of these wire-less systems has taken place. On 1 October 2015, Bombardier successfully completed a 41.6 km catenary-free test run with a tram powered entirely by its Primove battery in combination with a Mitrac propulsion system. The test run was conducted in the German city of Mannheim on the network of Rhein-Neckar-Verkehr GmbH (RNV), the transport operator for the region.

The innovative Primove battery system builds upon Bombardier’s many years of experience with energy storage systems. The system combines high power capacity and

exceptional battery life with good reliability and has been designed to maximise performance using the latest developments in nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) Li-Ion cells.

An advanced thermal conditioning unit maintains the battery’s ideal temperature and enables rapid charging and full braking energy recovery while extending life up to ten years.

German partnershipThis is another milestone in the

long-standing partnership between RNV and Bombardier, and represents the evolution of e-mobility. Both companies have always focussed strongly on e-mobility as well as on exploring different applications of this concept.

RNV operates in the cities of Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen and Mannheim in the German province of Baden-Württemberg and owns 82 Bombardier-built trams.

In December 2009, six of these trams were commissioned and featured the first commercial application of Bombardier’s Mitrac Energy Saver at RNV’s Heidelberg site. This makes a 30% energy saving and utilises an energy-recovery system - three roof-mounted energy storage units use their capacitors to store the energy generated during braking, ready to release it again when accelerating or during operation.

The Mitrac Energy Saver features high-performance double-layer capacitors which store up to 3kWh per vehicle. When starting up

tram recordBattery-powered

Augsburg tram.

Primove in China.


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and accelerating, vehicles require a particularly large amount of electricity and put a significant burden on the power supply network. Drawing power from the Mitrac capacitors reduces this by some 40 per cent, allowing the network to be utilised more cost effectively.

Using stored energy has also allowed sections of the route to be operated without contact wires. A total of 19 vehicles were equipped with this feature.

Buses tooPrimove doesn’t just power trams. Since June 2015,

city centre bus line 63 in Mannheim, Germany, has been operated by two fully electric buses, charged and powered by Primove technology. This has proved the system’s suitability for regular revenue service, even on demanding bus routes, giving passengers a quiet and emission-free ride.

Mannheim’s new e-bus line is the result of cooperation between regional transport operator RNV, Bombardier Transportation, the City of Mannheim, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Swiss bus manufacturer Hess AG. The 12-metre vehicles are the first of their kind to be equipped with the complete Primove package, which includes wireless charging technology, long-life battery system and a fully integrated propulsion system.

Electrifying the bus route presented the team with several challenges. Not only does the nine-kilometre line run through the heart of the city, but buses typically only rest at each stop for a very limited time. To meet this challenge, a series of four fast, high-power charging stations were installed at strategic locations along the line, one at each end stop and one at the bus depot.

With this arrangement, the system only needs to charge for about thirty seconds at each of the four charging stops and then for approximately five minutes at the end stops. This is enough to provide a single e-bus with sufficient energy to serve the entire route and eliminates the need for any additional charging or time-consuming battery exchanges. Mannheim’s two e-buses will save around 180 tonnes of CO2 per year, equal to the emissions of 74 private cars.

In addition to the two buses, a fully electric Primove-equipped van will also be used by RNV as a service and delivery vehicle. With a maximum range of 240km, it can easily complete its daily 80km service route after charging wirelessly at the depot for just 180 minutes. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI).

The Primove batteryDesigned specifically for public transport applications,

Primove battery systems were developed and tested according to safety standards both from the railway and automotive sectors. The multi-level safety concept covers all aspects of functional, electrical, chemical, mechanical and occupational safety, making it one of the safest battery systems on the market today.

Through the Primove Care portal, all battery system components will be monitored in real-time, providing feedback on their usage and remote failure analysis to optimise the reliability and availability of the system.

China followedIn addition to the above applications in Germany, the

combination of Primove battery and Mitrac propulsion equipment has been in revenue service on the Hexi line in Nanjing, China since August 2014. Six trams, built by CRRC Puzhen under Bombardier license, operate without overhead cables on 90 per cent of the lines. The batteries are charged during passenger service via the pantograph, statically at tram stops and dynamically during deceleration.

In total, six vehicles run on the Hexi line, which connects four stops on central metro lines 1 and 2 with the venues of the Youth Olympic Games. Another seven vehicles are planned for the 9km Qilin line, also in Nanjing, which features steep sections and an elevated route over a major highway.

Following on from these successful introductions in Germany and China, the Primove/Mitrac combination is now being considered for other systems requiring catenary-free operation (CFO) around the globe.

Primove battery.

Six vehicles run on the Hexi line in Nanjing, China.

Rail Engineer • December 2015 79LIGHT RAIL/M

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With passenger numbers increasing, rail is enjoying a boom period, leading to new investment in Crossrail and HS2. In addition, there is also speculation that some of the regional lines ‘axed’ in

the ‘Beeching Cuts’ of the 1950s may be reopened.

The modern challenge is a complex one: to manage increased footfall whilst ensuring safe, secure and comfortable passage for all. Carefully specified entrance and exit systems improve passenger flow, working seamlessly with ticketing, parking and retail operations to optimise the movement of people and goods.

Can it cope?Auditing footfall is critical to

ensuring doors are coping with traffic. The main considerations are not simply volume and frequency-related either, passenger demographic and behaviour, at the entrance and inside, must be understood at both peak and quiet times.

Mobility impaired access is a core consideration. Entrances should be designed to international standards, with the needs of less mobile passengers met. Manual door systems, thankfully now uncommon in station entrances, are prohibitive - automation is a real option in almost every case, with modernisation kits being a simple and effective way to upgrade performance and capacity.

Activation devices and access control options are many and varied, so consultation with a specialist is encouraged.

Mind the doors, pleaseOnline ticketing has revolutionised

the efficiency of railway stations over the past five years. The conventional place for ticketing machines is just past the entrance, keeping ‘online’ users away from manual ticketing desks. Ensuring queues for self-dispensing machines don’t block entrances is vital. Reducing blockages, barriers and breakdowns, through planning and adequate servicing, is the most effective way to ensure passengers reach the platform on time, even in the busiest rush hour.

During planning, the width of opening, placement of doors and choice of activation devices (which trigger automated opening) should be considered in context: proximity to ticketing machines needs planning.

Temperature controlOnce upon a time, railway

stations were perceived as cold, windswept places, but times have changed. Millennial stations incorporate retail and food concessions as standard. Major refurbishments, for example those at Birmingham New Street, indicate the movement towards modern and inviting. Keeping stations warm in winter and cool in summer may be a challenge, but it is not impossible. Automated entrances play their part in any success.

Doors which are left open unnecessarily haemorrhage expensively conditioned air, so expediting their return to a ‘fully sealed close’ is sensible. Intelligent directional sensors reduce ‘stand open’ time, whilst ensuring trailing cases/bags are safely clear of impact areas before closing.

Sliding door systems are available, in single and bi-parting arrangements, with aluminium frames (various thicknesses) to suit wind/weather conditions. Thermally-broken options improve energy performance at the entrance, thus bringing the goal of warmer stations closer to reality.

Effective automation creates highly functional entrances, which are ideally suited to transport hubs.

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COLLIN CARR

The focus moves to Bristol(Modernisation of the Great Western route continues)

MetroWest map showing both Phases 1 and 2 overlaid on the existing rail network.


As regular readers will be aware, the Great Western railway is slowly but surely shedding its rather tired mid-twentieth-century image. It is beginning to show that it has the potential to match any main line railway route in Europe, although there is still plenty of work to be done.

The Edwardian barrel roof over the northern platforms at Paddington station has been restored by Network Rail, with Morgan Sindall as its main contractor. A joint venture with Colas Rail and Morgan Sindall, valued at £20 million, is currently underway to refurbish the three earlier, Victorian roof spans which should be complete by the end of 2016.

In July 2014, as part of an £895 million project, a brand new station opened a year ahead of schedule in Reading. Then, in 2015, the £45 million viaduct was completed to the west of the station offering significant improvements to passenger and freight traffic flows by helping to unlock a major bottleneck on the route.

A master signal box at Didcot, designed to manage and control the signalling system from London to the West, links into a new operations centre in Cardiff which is currently the focus of a new signalling system between Cardiff and the Rhymney Valley due to be completed in 2017.

There is, of course, also the highly publicised scheme to electrify the route from London to Oxford, Newbury and Bristol then on to Cardiff with new electric trains arriving by the end of 2017. It is impossible to avoid the parliamentary discussions that are taking place relating to the cost of this project. Suffice it to say that this project offers a significant challenge to engineers and the recent work carried out in the Bath area, at Box Tunnel, Dundas Aqueduct and Sydney Gardens (issue 132, October 2015), demonstrates that good progress is being made and the many significant engineering challenges are being addressed.

So, great things are happening on this route but there is one significant location that has had little mention given its size, and that is Bristol. However, that is now beginning to change and as Andy Haynes, Network Rail’s project director for the GW Route Modernisation, pointed out, these changes will be quite significant.

MetroWest plansFor many years, Bristol has had plans

to develop local railway routes, and now MetroWest has the £100 million funding necessary to reopen closed lines and provide new stations and new services for the area.

Phase 1 of MetroWest will reopen the Portishead branch line via Pill and improve commuter services on the Severn Beach line and on to Bath. Phase 2 of MetroWest will see the reopening of the Henbury line, with new stations at Henbury and North Filton, and services to Yate and a new station at Ashley Down. In addition, two additional tracks will be reinstated over 10km between Bristol Temple Meads, Dr Days Jn and Filton South Jn near Bristol Parkway.

Work which is tied into the electrification work on the GWML is already underway for commuters on the Bath route and a contract has been awarded to Taylor Woodrow, valued at £33 million, to re instate the two additional tracks from Dr Days Jn to Filton South Jn. It is a three-year contract which includes the reconstruction of four bridges and the refurbishment of a further 13 structures plus a significant amount of trackwork.

Work started in September 2015, clearing the significant amount of vegetation that has grown over the years and raising bridge parapet walls to the required 1.85m to maintain the safety of pedestrians when the line is electrified.

New underbridge this ChristmasIn addition, preparations for the construction

of a new underbridge at Parsons Street are progressing. The new bridge is designed to carry the four tracks over a new four-lane highway. Temporary bridge spans are being constructed to enable pile foundations and abutments to be constructed ready to receive a new bridge deck which will be constructed alongside the formation and slid into place over the newly constructed abutments. This final phase will be completed over the Christmas period.

The junctions at Dr Days, Narroways Hill - leading onto the Severn Beach line, and Filton South will all have to be remodelled and there is a significant amount of re-profiling of embankments and cuttings, the most significant being Horfield cutting. In preparation for the new fleet of electric trains and the increased capacity they will deliver, Network Rail will also be adding a new platform at Bristol Parkway and at Filton Abbeywood.


Arup Engineering Consultants are responsible for all the design work involved and Network Rail will use the expertise of its S&C Alliance with Colas Rail for work associated with the remodelling of the junctions. Once the new track layout is in place, Network Rail’s National Framework Agreement with ABC (Alstom, Babcock, Costain) will move in to install the overhead structures and catenary for the electrification scheme.

Work on the Portishead branch, to the west of Bristol Temple Meads station, is planned for completion in 2019 and, with all the building and development that has taken on this route, it will inevitably offer huge benefits to the city of Bristol.

Temple MeadsThe geographical hub for all this work is

Bristol Temple Meads. Built as the western terminus of the Great Western Railway’s main line from London to Bristol, the station has undergone many changes as it has outgrown Brunel’s original building and become the railway gateway to the West Country.

The original Bristol station, designed by I K Brunel in a ‘mock Tudor’ style was, like the original Paddington station, a terminus which consisted of simply an arrival and a departure platform. It opened on 31 August 1840 with trains running from Bristol as far as Bath, nearly a year before the start of through traffic to London. The station buildings had a boardroom and offices for the ‘Bristol Committee’ of the Great Western Railway.

Today, Bristol Temple Meads is located right at the heart of another Bristol initiative, the Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone (BTQEZ), designed to maximise the use of the significant amount of waste land around the

station area to develop commerce and make the station area part of the rapidly expanding city centre.

The station is now one of the busiest and fastest growing rail interchanges on the Western route with more than nine million passengers on average every year. The aspiration of BTQEZ and Network Rail is to redevelop the station into a location that provides excellent rail links, which in turn will attract new businesses and investment.

Andy outlined the proposals for the station which include general improvements within the station, to ease current and predicted passenger congestion, and a new station entrance. At present, the station acts as a barrier to the land on the east side of the station so it is proposed that a new eastern station entrance is introduced to ease congestion and provide a convenient link across and around the Temple Quarter.

“If you want a pasty whilst in the station,” said Andy, “that’s okay, but there is very little else.” So there are plans to introduce a light and airy subway extension under the existing forecourt to provide a welcoming environment and improve retail opportunities for local businesses. The challenge is to achieve this objective whilst preserving the fabric and views of this historic grade 1 listed structure.

To accommodate the increase in train movements resulting from the MetroWest initiative, the proposals include the demolition of the existing signal box, allowing access for trains into a redeveloped Midland shed, bringing it back to its former usage. The demolition will also create space to construct two platforms to accommodate the increased train services.

So far, after two months of preparatory work, the engineering team at Bristol Temple Meads removed the bridge structure that supported the old Post Office conveyor belts at the east

end of the station on Christmas Day last year. The platforms have subsequently been repaired after the removal of the conveyor belt piers and lift shafts.

New station roofNetwork Rail is about to let a contract to

Balfour Beatty to renew the roof to the main train shed starting early in 2016. This work will include grit blasting the archways and painting, new lighting and new glazing. The work is expected to take two years so the new bright and clean roof will be ready to receive the much cleaner electric trains. Arup is also responsible for the design work associated with the station roof work and the two new platforms in the Wyatt shed.

As stated earlier, whilst all the civil engineering work is progressing, the less noticeable but no less significant signalling enhancement works are taking place, effectively renewing the whole signalling system. Network Rail is installing fibre-optic cabling and new driver communication systems designed to improve train performance.

This work also dovetails into the construction of the new £80 million train maintenance depot at Stoke Gifford in the Filton triangle. This work, by VolkerFitzpatrick, is now well advanced and will be ready to receive the new Hitachi train sets due to arrive in 2017.

So, the momentum is building. The fruits of all the preparatory work carried out by Andy Haynes and his team of skilled engineers to turn the plans into reality are now slowly but surely materialising. The focus is moving to the city of Bristol which is becoming the centre of attention with regard to the modernisation of the Great Western route and hopefully, providing lots of good material for future articles!


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Signalling Diagram

8

Transport has always had its timetables. The stage and mail coaches that ran up until the mid nineteenth century used basic timetables but, as we shall see later in this article, the spin-off resource diagrams would have

been as complicated as anything used in the modern day railway.

The coaches of old, and our modern buses, have the advantage that they can overtake each other and they have - or had - to some degree, quite reasonable stopping power. Trains on the other hand have great difficulty overtaking and their stopping power, or lack of it, is a significant issue.

The National network will be introducing a new timetable on 13 December and so Rail Engineer thought it would be the right time to talk to Fiona Dolman, capacity planning director at Network Rail to see what is involved.

The December timetable is not really new. It’s the evolution of years of development that is revised to cater for a multitude of external influences twice a year. Many trains will not be changed. At the other end of the scale, whole new services will be introduced as a result of new infrastructure being commissioned or new rolling stock being introduced.

First, sharpen your pencilHow does it all begin? There are

many inputs into a service. There are franchise obligations that fix the level of service - the number of trains, the frequency and the number of seats available being but a few of the parameters.

There are franchisee aspirations which overlay the minimum obligations. There are influences from outside the industry from a wide variety of stakeholders. Put everything into the melting pot and a basic set of train graphs can be constructed.

The train graph, at its simplest, is a visual representation of the progress of a train showing distance travelled against time. The trains appear as lines on a sheet of paper, or more recently, on a computer screen. To the practiced eye an express train will have a completely different appearance to a stopping train or a freight train. One of the golden rules to be followed is that

the lines must not clash. Indeed they should be kept apart from each other by a minimum distance. This represents the headway between the trains - the distance determined by the signalling of the line. The ‘more practiced eye’ will be able to make sense of some of the more complex train graphs accompanying this article.

Fitting in all the trains needed to run a service, at the same time as satisfying timetabling rules, is the job of a train planner. The timetable rules include such issues as station dwell-time, terminus turn-round time, headways on plain line and at junctions. Coupled with the fact that different trains have different acceleration and braking characteristics and that timing is further influenced by line gradients, this can all get a little complicated.

It would be tempting to look at the timetabling rules and to expect that these could be expressed digitally, so that the whole exercise could be plumbed into a grand timetable computer programme. After all, we have had road route planning software for years.

GPS software in a car will sort out routes and timings against embedded rules to produce what is, in effect, a timetable for a journey. Can that technology not be aligned with the railway network? Well, no is the short answer. The slightly longer answer is that there are timetabling programmes that do a great deal of the work, but not all.

Manual interventionIt is possible to build a basic, fully

annotated train graph on a computer, but the finer practical details still need human intervention. The problem that has bedevilled train planners, throughout not only the UK but the

GRAHAME TAYLORCreating the new timetable


whole of the planet, is that some of the timetable rules are inconsistent and erratic.

Some, for example terminus turnround times, involve simple integers for the most part, but then they disintegrate into a complicated string of words that are dependent on a long list of factors influenced by other illogical constraints elsewhere on the network. There have been valiant attempts to crack the problem, but the human brain is still the best tool to sort out all the practical intricacies of the complex national timetable.

Fiona is realistic. “It’s one of our aspirations to have a system that will not only populate a timetable but also test it for practicality with the further ability to feed in a variety of ‘what ifs’ into the mix.”

The basic timetable is just the start. It’s simply a collection of figures, a scattering of lines on a screen. Downstream is a welter of resource detail. There is little point having a bonny timetable if there are not enough trains available to fit all the paths. The trains need to match the likely demand for seats. There needs to be enough train crew available to staff the trains. Trains need to be in the right place at the end of the day so that the service can be started the next day. Rolling stock has to be inspected, serviced, and overhauled at specific intervals. All this has to be built into the timetable proposals.

The compilation of any timetable can stretch back to around five years before the press date. Train operating companies submit their bids to Network Rail, the custodian of the national timetable, so that the proposals can be checked against all the other demands by all other interested train operators.

Conflicts at junctions need to be resolved. Platforming at terminals - often a critical factor - has to be checked so that incoming services don’t block in those about to depart.

After a series of iterations/negotiations, an agreement is reached on the likely shape of the services. These need to be checked back with rolling stock arrangements and also checked against the conditions of service of the train crew.

Pear-shapedThis is all fine so long as everything goes to plan. But, of

course, real life can get in the way. There is the expected and the unexpected. Expected issues include bad weather and engineering work. Unexpected issues could involve the sudden loss of a route.

Looking right back to the way that a new timetable is compiled, it is pretty obvious that any changes because of planned engineering work would demand similar timescales in planning. A timetable catering for the loss or heavy modification of a route for engineering is in effect a new timetable. Downstream alterations to stock and crews are just as complicated and there’s the additional issue of planning the transition from normal working to engineering working and back again so that a normal service can resume without anyone noticing.

Train planners are sanguine about engineering. It happens, and it’s the job of a train planner to... plan trains (and buses for that matter). Some engineers might think that cancelling a possession might be doing the world a favour. This is not necessarily the case. In fact, the nearer to the possession, the more difficult it is to disentangle all the rolling stock and train crew arrangements. There is no quick ‘undo’ button in train planning!

There are times of major disruption when one of a suite of pre-planned special timetables are brought in. These are developed well in advance and are switched on in the event of the loss of a complete route or terminus, for example. For any sudden emergency the initiative for running a service is handed directly to the route controller who retains control until matters stabilise.

Fiona makes the valid point that “for the railway to work right across the network and across administrative boundaries requires complete commitment from everyone, from the front line right through to the architects of the service.”

It’s an enormous logistical exercise complicated by trains’ innate inability to shuffle their relative positions. And it is in the gift of engineers - if they’re not careful - to thoroughly stitch up the service with untimely ambushes.

The stage and mail coaches of old had basic timetables. They had complicated staffing and motive power issues (horses) but they were able to defend themselves from ambushes. Their drivers were issued with blunderbusses - items that don’t seem to appear on train rosters these days.

Some signalling diagrams can be quite complex.


H ic sunt dracones translates from the Latin as ‘here be dragons’. Many believe that it appeared on ancient maps to show the limits of cartographers’ understanding at the time, emphasising the threats from venturing over borders into the unknown. Surprisingly, the words appear on maybe just the one globe of around 1507, but

that doesn’t stop them from being a neat way of saying, “Proceed at your peril. You really don’t know what you’re getting into!”

This notion of monsters and many-headed hydrae (or maybe its hydras) lurking to devour the unwary would have influenced the way that the navigators of old ventured beyond their comfort zone.

Of course, in fact, monsters there were few. Hydrae were mono-capitated if they existed at all. Life was not as complicated or terrifying as first thought.

Over the boundaryThese days, some of our minor railway colleagues,

particularly on the signalling and operating side, gaze at working drawings that cover not only their territory but also that of the main line railways. They look over their boundaries using maps which, whilst having a deal of technical detail, also have the implied ‘hic sunt dracones’.

Some have ventured into the unknown and all report that there really are dragons, monsters and many-headed hydrae too. It’s all true!

But the monsters and hydrae are benign, a complete change from ancient days (that’s about 20 years ago). It

(Above) signal gantry on the approach to Scarborough station.(Below right) The same gantry being re-erected at Grosmont.


doesn’t mean that you don’t have to be very careful. They can be upset and can prevent any incursions onto their territory.

The Minor Railway Section of the IRSE held its bi-annual technical workshop in a room above the museum of the Severn Valley Railway at Kidderminster recently. Ably choreographed by Major Ian Hughes of Green Dragon Rail, no relation to those mentioned above, the event was sponsored by Signal Aspects Ltd. (the company set up by our very own writer Stuart Marsh). Several of the papers presented dealt with the tricky issue of running trains from Minor Railways onto the mainline network. These movements are no longer just the occasional locomotive and stock movement, they are full blown, regular timetabled moves. Minor railway trains have, in several locations, been integrated into the mainline timetable.

Onto the mainline networkTake, for example, the Swanage branch. This

was shut in 1972, the metals removed and the rail link from Wareham to Swanage effectively destroyed. Stirling efforts by volunteers with political support brought a restored railway

closer and closer to the main line with the obvious ambition to reinstate services to the coast. Michael Walshaw described the negotiations and the resultant signalling arrangements that closed the gap.

The North Yorkshire Moors Railway harboured (!) an ambition to run all the way from Pickering to Whitby, joining the national network at Grosmont. It was challenging and Charles Weightman gave an account of the various complex stages of the scheme to expand the facilities at Whitby station and Grosmont East to allow the NYMR to run five trains a day to the coastal resort.

There was an interesting twist to the tale with a paper presented by Ronald Bresser of Movares who outlined almost parallel issues in the big container depots in the Netherlands. These are private railways that have multiple movements to and from the main line railways. But these are not just the odd few coaches; they are long, very long freight trains. Dwell too long sorting out acceptance on either side of the border and valuable minutes tick by.

The Ffestiniog Railway and the Welsh Highland Railway had an operating issue at Porthmadog station which they both share. The notions of borders and dragons is far less pronounced here, but there was still the problem of a train from one railway stitching up moves for the other operator. Tim Prent gave an account of the thought processes that went into an ambitious project to widen their infrastructure to give everyone elbow room to run their services. It was a ‘chunky’ scheme which didn’t hit the headlines at the time which is why we’ve given it a bit of exposure here.

Minor Railways and

GRAHAME TAYLOR

monsters


Heroic restorationsThe minor railway guys are amazing when it comes to

rescuing bits of kit. Dominic Beglin of Peak Rail showed a pallet load of what appeared, to the uninitiated, to be ‘parts destined for the furnace’. The result of a clear out by the National Railway Museum, these turned out to be priceless (maybe an exaggeration) components for a wire operated turnover lever frame. There was a tale of missing parts, sketchy records, trips to Vietnam and just sheer determination to make something work, which it did.

Similar treatment was given to a monster signal gantry that had had a chequered career. It was moved from Scarborough to its new location at Grosmont having been shorted, repaired and fitted with carefully refurbished timberwork described by Craig Donald.

AwardIn the closing stages of the workshop, the cacophony

of kids of all ages knocking seven bells out of the exhibits in the museum below had begun to subside. The sun had come out after a morning of dire weather that had driven everyone indoors from the platforms. This relative calm allowed Mike Tyrell to deliver his citation for the MRS volunteer of the year. The deserving recipient, Geoff Harris of the Bluebell Railway, benefited from a range of goodies and a wildly unstable and heavy trophy in the form of a token staff from the Bluebell Railway.

The success of this workshop, and indeed the whole Minor Railway Section of the IRSE, comes down to the fact that those who have the custody of the UK’s minor railways are regarded as being just as professionally competent as their counterparts on the national network. In some cases, of course, the hydrae wear one head (or more) for their day job and another (or more) for their volunteer passion. It’s easier to talk that way.

(Above) Wareham station.(Above right) Stuart Marsh 'on display'.


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Rail Engineer - Issue 134 - December 2015