20 | the rail engineer | june 2012
Introducing
feature
writer
Lawrence Roberts Marketing Manager, DeltaRail
IECC Scalable (Above) IECC Screens used for testing and support at DeltaRail’s head office in Derby. (Right) The old (IECC Classic) installation at Swindon B, comprising a total of seven cabinets.
and particularly signalling S ignalling, control, is an aspect of railway engineering that is always progressing. Technology improves and systems become more sophisticated, all the while driven by the need to improve safety, run more trains, and reduce costs. It is now over twenty years since the first Integrated Electronic Control Centre (IECC) was introduced in the UK, and now the product takes a significant pace forward as Derby-based DeltaRail launches its next generation signalling control product - IECC Scalable. This is now in pilot at the Swindon B signal box and is due to migrate to the new Thames Valley Signalling Centre (TVSC) late in 2012. The company has been providing its firstgeneration control system, now renamed “IECC Classic”, for use on the UK mainline network for the last 23 years, and it is now the most widely deployed VDU signalling control system on Network Rail with over 50 workstations in service. IECC Classic currently controls many of the busiest parts of the UK network, with recent installations including the North London Line (controlled from Upminster and Liverpool Street) and Reading (at TVSC). Modern signalling control systems take the form of sophisticated signalling software, running on a dedicated hardware platform, that is able to send control requests to the interlockings (the hardware that provides the front line safety system), which in turn drive the signals and points. The signaller sits at a desk with a set of Visual Display Units (VDUs) that show the layout of the track, the location and identification of trains, and the status of the signals. In the case of IECC, the signals are controlled by the signaller using a keyboard and a trackball.
Origins of IECC IECC Classic was originally developed by British Rail Research, with the first installations commissioned in 1989 at Liverpool Street, Yoker (on North Clydeside) and York. Since then, DeltaRail has undertaken several upgrades to IECC to replace obsolete components and to enhance functionality. Specialist graphics cards and tape loggers, for example, have been replaced with robust industrial PCs, and new software has been incorporated to automatically identify and alert the signaller if a train passes a signal at danger (SPAD alarms). IECC Classic is capable of interfacing to the different types of interlocking in the UK, which has made it a flexible control system capable of keeping pace with developments in the design of interlockings. DeltaRail is continuing with this strategy, with improved interfaces reducing the cost and time of implementing new systems.
The Classic system architecture, organised around duplicated networks and serial communication links, has remained the same for the last 23 years. It is now time for a new architecture, and DeltaRail has delivered the proven functionality of IECC Classic on industry standard blade hardware and the LINUX operating system. A very important architecture change is the inclusion of IBM’s Websphere® technology resulting in much faster development of new features and simpler integration with existing and next generation systems. IECC’s strength has always been in enabling high railway traffic capacity from a large control centre, but it was too expensive for smaller signalling schemes because of the cost of the minimum configuration of seven cabinets of hardware. A key feature of the new product is that it is the most costeffective system for all scheme sizes, with a minimum of only two cabinets, hence the name “IECC Scalable”.