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INDUSTRY FOCUS


RAIL HEADING TeXT Standfirst


The case for The digiTal railway


Paul Waring, business development manager for Rail


at Rainford Solutions, examines why protection of physical assets will be critical to the success of the rail industry’s digital ambitions


L


ast month, London’s £19 billion Elizabeth Line carried its first paying passengers. Building the line has been


an extraordinary physical feat, requiring engineers to thread 42km of new tunnels under the city, construct ten brand new stations, and refurbish more than 30 existing ones. The line’s digital infrastructure is equally


impressive. As one of the most advanced railways in the world, the tunnels, track, rolling stock and passenger facilities are stitched together by a complex web of digital systems. More than 60,000 communications and control assets are dotted along and around the route, connected by over 250km of optical fibre and countless km of copper cable. The line relies on six different radio systems, operating across 12 different frequency bands. This provides a glimpse of things to come


for the wider UK rail network. Under Network Rail’s Digital Railway Programme, advanced technologies that are being rolled out today on the Elizabeth Line and at other selected sites will become ‘business as usual’ from 2027. Those technologies are intended to increase capacity, reduce journey times, and make the railway safer for passengers and staff alike.


ProTecTing vulnerable asseTs


Alongside those opportunities, the digital railway also creates new challenges for the people who build, operate and maintain the rail network. One key challenge is the protection of thousands of new and upgraded assets. Some of those assets will be fitted to trains; others will operate in centralised, climate-controlled data centres. But many more will spend their working lives


4 DESIGN SOLUTIONS JUNE 2022 0


outdoors, on station platforms or beside the track. Distributed assets of this type include signalling controls, radio base stations, telecommunication network switches, and condition monitoring devices, among many others. Most of these distributed assets require


an enclosure to protect sensitive equipment from sun, rain, dust, and damage by rodents or insects. Those enclosures need to be physically secure, to prevent theft or malicious damage, but they also need to be easy to access, so maintenance staff can complete essential tasks quickly, easily, and safely. Such enclosures need to perform all those functions for three or four decades with little, or ideally no, maintenance attention. Sensitive electronic assets must also be


protected from themselves. In addition to solar thermal loads, trackside electronic equipment may consume several hundred watts of power, most of which ends up as heat inside the enclosure. The industry’s preferred way of managing this heat is through passive cooling, using protected vents to release hot air from the top of the enclosure and draw cool air in at the bottom. With the use of higher-power equipment, however, active cooling systems using fans or air conditioning units are becoming more common. Where equipment is vulnerable to extreme low temperatures, auxiliary heaters may be installed to maintain the internal temperature of the enclosure on cold days.


digiTal raises The sTakes Trackside electrical and electronic


Many assets will be located outdoors


equipment is nothing new for the rail industry, but the advent of the digital railway makes equipment protection more difficult, and more vital, for several reasons. Digitisation will increase the number of places that equipment is installed across the network, for example, which means more enclosures to install, monitor and maintain. Digital railway systems also involve the


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