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HIGH PERFORMANCE SIGNALLING | Doc Frank Heibel

Capacity for Metro Signalling

Disclaimer: Any individual or business decision you may make based on the content of this article is solely and fully your own responsibility, and you cannot under any circumstance hold me, my business, or the publisher of this newsletter responsible for any consequences of such decisions.

In last month’s article, I wrote about setting capacity targets for the High Performance Signalling technology you plan to introduce, CBTC or advanced varieties of ETCS.

For a quick recap, I differentiated between design capacity and operational capacity, the difference being the capacity margin. What I did not mention last time is that the higher the capacity margin the higher the reliability of your operations, in other words the punctuality of your train services. This supports my recommendation from the previous article that you should aim for the highest possible realistic capacity target for your railway and that the chosen technology supports.

For today’s discussion. it is important to define another technical term: headway. The headway is the time (not distance!) between two trains that follow each other on the same railway line. The headway is inverse to capacity. For a capacity of 30 trains per hour the average headway is two minutes, because two times thirty is 60 (minutes in one hour).

From this, it can be derived that headway is inversely proportional to capacity. That means if capacity goes up, headway needs to come down. You have a two-minute headway for 30 tph but a longer three-minute headway for lower 20 tph capacity.

The use of headway as a measure of time is critical to conveying my key point in today’s article. And that is the operational impact on the capacity of a railway. Specifically, the length of time that trains spend stopped in stations.

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High Performance Signalling

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HIGH PERFORMANCE SIGNALLING | Monthly Articles

Ask Doc Frank Heibel

Ask directly Doc Frank Heibel for professional inquiery related to railway engineering
 
Articles by Doc Frank Heibel

What is High Performance Signalling?

First of all, welcome dear reader to my column about “High Performance Signalling”. I hope you find these articles insightful and instructive and will do my best to give you premium “food for thought” as well as practical and applicable advice. Yet it is prudent to add this…

So what do I mean by High Performance Signalling? And why do I think that CBTC provides that more than ETCS or any other mainstream signalling technology?

I coined that term High Performance Signalling around 2016 because I thought, and still think, that the popular (at least here in Australia) term High Capacity Signalling…

ask the doc | doc frank heibel
Ask directly Doc Frank Heibel for professional inquiery related to railway engineering and read more..
I coined that term High Performance Signalling around 2016 because I thought, and still think, that the popular (at least here in Australia) term High Capacity Signalling is unnecessarily narrow. Thinking about the additional benefits besides higher capacity that CBTC offers, I came up with a framework called CARA. Read more..
specialised in two technologies for High Performance Signalling: CBTC, the Communications-Based Train Control system, and ETCS, the European Train Control System. I found that when it comes to performance-enhancing varieties of ETCS, they become more and more similar to CBTC. Read more..
In my last column, I wrote that the ideal way of introducing the European Train Control System (ETCS) for a real interoperable outcome is to start with two trackside suppliers, give each of them one pilot project, and have them jointly develop the ETCS specification for your particular application. Read more..

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