The Land Transport Authority (LTA) has awarded a multi-million dollar contract to Siemens Pte Ltd & Engie Services Pte Ltd Consortium for the supply of more than 1,250 new track circuits, and Siemens RailCom Manager System, which will provide a fully integrated track circuit condition monitoring solution.
In total, Siemens will supply 1,253 of the company’s FS 2550 track circuits for the North-South and East-West Singapore MRT lines. They will be installed in 58 signaling equipment rooms across the network, replacing the existing, life-expired equipment.
Installed in the operational control centre, the Siemens RailCom Manager System will receive data from each of the track circuit and constantly monitor their condition. Through advanced analytical techniques, the System will provide alarm and advanced warning of any deterioration in performance.
By being able to accurately determine the condition of each track circuit, the introduction of RailCom Manager will eliminate the disruptive, time-consuming and costly issue of 'false positives', enabling maintenance teams to focus their resource only on identified track circuits that genuinely require attention. This emphasis on predictive maintenance also minimizes the amount of time that maintenance staff will be required to work trackside, bringing additional safety benefits.
The introduction of track circuit condition monitoring means that faults will be immediately flagged and recorded, and trend analysis will be able to identify any underlying or recurring issues.
Commenting on the award of the contract, Michel Obadia, CEO of Siemens Mobility Pte Ltd, said: "We believe that our track circuit condition monitoring system is a great solution for this project and will deliver a wide range of operational, cost and performance benefits to LTA. In the past, false positives had been a real issue, and it's one that we intend to completely eliminate. Capable of being fitted both in new applications and retrospectively, this is a perfect solution for all networks, and is increasingly relevant for network maintainers, given that access time is becoming such a precious commodity."
This project uses the latest generation of Siemens Railcom Manager System, hosted on the Siemens WinCC OA platform, to provide a real-time and remotely accessible track circuit condition monitoring application. As a result, rail workers will be able to view exactly where the problem is on the network and receive guidance on potential corrective measures while working trackside, viewing live activity and status updates on a tablet via the Mobile Telephone Data network.
The Railcom Manager suite is scalable to incorporate additional track circuits and expandable to incorporate monitoring of many other asset types. Further capability built into Railcom Manager is the ability to configure the suite beyond asset monitoring to line-wide management, station management and facilities SCADA, all within the same platform investment.