PHOTOGRAPHY CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
PRODUCTS & TECHNOLOGY
Cutting out the noise for PA systems Chatswood railway station in Sydney has implemented a new Digital PA system that promises to cut out the interruptions. Rail Express reports.
A
The EDC Acoustics CS-90 was the speaker chosen for the Chatswood project.
52
NNOUNCEMENTS ARE AN important component of train station organisation, but lots can get lost in the noise and bustle of a busy station. PA systems can sometimes overlap due to the sheer frequency of announcements that have to be made at any one time. Chatswood railway station on Sydney’s North Shore line was one such station facing the consequences of this. So many trains were passing through the station - which serves roughly 60,000 passengers a day and sees a train pass through every three minutes on average - that it was not a practical solution to have one announcement playing on each platform at a time. Given the station’s popularity and configuration of four tracks split into two islands, it was making announcements hard to prioritise for Sydney Trains and Sydney Metro, both of which used the station for their North Line and Northwest services respectively. Since there is only one audio system at the station and both operators needed to play announcements at the same time, Sydney Trains and Sydney Metro worked together with audio specialist supplier tm stagetec systems to find a more practical solution.
ISSUE 5 2019 | RAIL EXPRESS
Both Sydney Trains and Sydney Metro stated that they wanted their operators to be able to broadcast simultaneous announcements on adjacent platforms so that waiting passengers would be able to hear and understand the announcements on their platform, without being disrupted by similar and simultaneous announcements emanating from the other platform a few metres away. The project team came up with three proposed solutions in how to deal with the increasingly troublesome occurrence. The first proposed option was to prioritise the announcements between operators. However, it was decided by the team that due to the frequency of announcements to be played, it was nearly impossible to prioritise the announcements without compromising to other types of announcements such as safety or track works. The second proposed idea was to install a physical barrier in the middle of the island platform to block the sound spilling over to the other platform. However, since there was a lot of devices already installed along the platforms, and Chatswood was categorised as an Emergency Warning Information Communication (EWIS) station requiring a full fire assessment before
www.railexpress.com.au
