SIGNALLING & COMMUNICATIONS
The most ever spent on the Welsh railway
RTM talks to Network Rail’s route managing director for Wales, Mark Langman, about the upcoming £220m resignalling project in the Cardiff area, which also involves station and track upgrades.
M
ark Langman, who runs Network Rail in Wales, says that the 1960s-era cabling
and signalling infrastructure in the Cardiff area includes technology comparable to that used in Concorde – and says it is in just as much need of retirement.
The major £450m project to resignal South Wales has been ongoing since 2006/7, with areas such as Newport and parts of Port Talbot already done, and attention is now turning to the Cardiff area and the Valleys network.
In a three-year programme, 300 signals, 12 miles of track and 59 sets of points will be replaced, while seven new platforms will be built across the Cardiff and Valleys network, with station upgrades at the two city centre stations and a brand new two-platform station at Energlyn (see images, below).
The project also involves the removal of the bottleneck between Cardiff Central and Queen Street, allowing 16 trains per hour. Langman told us just how important that element of these works is, saying: “We’re restricted at the moment at 12 trains per hour between Queen Street and Central. That’s a two-line railway, an up line and down line, and all of the Valley line network runs across that corridor. So, it’s absolutely vital – it’s pivotal to our service. To increase that corridor to 16tph will allow an increase in services right across the Valleys network. If we couldn’t address that, it would
be impossible to expand services to the other Valley routes.”
Upgrading 1960s infrastructure
We asked Langman whether these works were more about providing capacity for forecast future growth – or about addressing urgent capacity needs that already exist.
He said: “Looking to the future, we’re seeing record passenger growth at the moment, and passengers still fl ocking back to the railways: we’re seeing roughly 8% growth, year-on-year. So we’re looking to meet that demand for the future.
“But also, there are some services in the peaks at the moment where you see over-crowding, and the reality is that the re-signalling that was done on this railway back in the 1960s by BR was the same technology that went into Concorde, and of course that’s already retired now.
“It’s starting to get old, and some of the wiring is starting to get quite degraded. It’s high- maintenance for us at the moment – so we need to do this work for several reasons.”
ERTMS – but not yet
Although this will be a defi nite upgrade, the signalling and communications is not as
“This kit we’re putting in is compatible with ERTMS in the future: you wouldn’t waste the equipment. But that’s still some way off and really, the condition of the signalling here demands that we do it now. We have to crack on, because of the amount of passengers using the network.”
The new signals will, however, be lightweight and easy to install.
Langman said: “We planned this as part of the wider South Wales resignalling scheme, before ERTMS was rolled out onto the Cambrian network. Network Rail has got a roll-out programme for the GWML and parts of the ECML, and yes eventually it will arrive here in Cardiff.
advanced as that seen elsewhere on the Wales network – the Cambrian line is the fi rst in the UK to use ERTMS.
116 | rail technology magazine Aug/Sep 12
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