TENDERS will be called by German Railway this month or next for the first three of seven Advanced Train Control Centres that will ultimately take over train operations from thousands of existing signalboxes. These will be turnkey projects of substantial size, with around 150 workstations each, and great complexity, especially in terms of software development. They will take many years to complete, not least because of the need to replace mechanical signalling and other devices incapable of being operated remotely.
DB’s initiative is all the more remarkable because, until recently, signalbox control areas had been very limited in Germany. Michael Kant of Alcatel SEL told last month’s AIC signalling conference in London how the ATCC has been developed with DB to control directly every aspect of hour-by-hour running of the operational railway, including maintenance. This will embrace passenger information, and even escalators at stations. Notable exceptions are the railway’s exclusive 16·7Hz traction power network and the S-Bahn in Berlin and maybe other cities.
Railtrack is launching this year development of up to seven Management Control Centres, with the first probably at Eastleigh. These will play a similar role to the German ATCCs in operating Britain’s 16000 km network, although the initial remote control task to be transferred (from Woking) is expected to be the 750VDC traction power supply broadly covering the area of the South West Trains franchise.
The conceptual jump from the dispatching function to integrating hands-on management of the complete railway operation in a single building takes some grasping, but the logic is compelling. The cost of reliable data transfer over wide-area networks has become negligible. Much operating and commercial data currently collected for different purposes can be merged, producing major cost savings and raising efficiency. Automatic route setting backed up by conflict resolution algorithms is already turning dispatchers into short-term timetable editors.
Staff reductions in prospect are formidable. Union Pacific led the way in 1989 with its Harriman Dispatching Centre (RG 3.90 p186) controlling and managing the entire network from Omaha. BNSF and CSX built similar facilities at Fort Worth and Jacksonville - the latter is currently being upgraded to perform more functions, with more lines to be added when Conrail is split.
While UP and BNSF are 20% bigger than DB in route-km, the passenger-oriented European networks with their much higher train densities pose an altogether more complex and formidable task considered to be beyond the capacity of a single control centre. Paul Carroll, Engineering Manager for the Railtrack project, explained that the Management Control Centres will not spring into being overnight. Rather, there will be ’migration of control’ as new management information systems are created and interfaces with relay-based signalling up to 40 years old are put in place. Nonetheless, train control in Europe is going to look very different five years from now. o
