CONDITION MONITORING
Latest-generation CBTC driving urban rail modernisation
CREDIT: THALES
Rail Express speaks with Thales’ Arnaud Besse about the company’s seventh-generation SelTrac CBTC system.
The Dubai Metro, the world’s longest driverless metro at 70 kilometres, is supported by SelTrac CBTC.
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VER THREE DECADES SINCE commercialisation, Thales’ SelTrac Communications Based Train Control (CBTC) system has been installed on more than 100 metro lines, in over 40 major cities around the world, and moves more than three billion passengers every year. Thales launched the future-focused seventh generation of the SelTrac train control system, SelTrac G7, at Innotrans 2018, and will demonstrate the system again at AusRAIL PLUS 2019 in Sydney later this year. Arnaud Besse, Marketing and Communications Director for Urban Rail Signalling at Thales, tells Rail Express the new generation of SelTrac is aimed at helping passenger operators achieve 100 per cent availability of service. “Every operator wants to reach 100 per cent availability of service, and so do we,” Besse says.
Changes in SelTrac G7 With the share of global population living in cities expected to rise from 50 to 70 per cent by 2050,
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ISSUE 6 2019 | RAIL EXPRESS
governments around the world must not only build new rail lines, but must maximise the capacity of existing infrastructure. Thales says it has developed its SelTrac system with this in mind: SelTrac G7 is designed to be as flexible as possible, to help different operators, on new and existing lines, using varied rollingstock. “SelTrac is both valid for greenfield and brownfield projects,” Besse explains, “and we are rollingstock provider agnostic. We have installed our system in trains from 14 different rollingstock manufacturers, which is pretty much every major rollingstock manufacturer on Earth.” Besse says after safety, the top priority in the development of SelTrac G7 has been working with customers to assess their needs. The result is a forward compatible system designed to ensure long and extendable design life, without the need for disruptive, system-wide re-signalling every time a new line is added or a new fleet enters service. Thales says SelTrac G7 features a set of advanced functions designed to better help public transport operators manage network growth, extensions and fleet expansions, and prepare for the future of control operations. Thales has improved the user interface for the centralised command-and-control system, which uses web technologies to allow users to work on their own workstations. The equipment installed on trains is also 20 per cent more compact for SelTrac G7, than for previous generations. The seventh-generation system is also designed to operate with any kind of telecommunication system, including new-generation LTE, which is notably favoured in China over WiFi for CBTC communications. Besse says one key innovation in SelTrac G7 is a bidirectional line management capability. This means if there is an issue at any given time, anywhere on the network, the operator can reconfigure the entire network to reduce or eliminate downtime. “When you have an incident on your line, SelTrac G7 can very quickly and safely put in place any provisional services that require trains to do something they’re not usually supposed to do,”
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