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Rethinking rail track switches for fault tolerance and enhanced performance

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-11-14, 09:27 authored by Sam Bemment, Emma Ebinger, Roger Goodall, Christopher Ward, Roger Dixon
© 2016, © IMechE 2016. Railway track switches, commonly referred to as ‘turnouts’ or ‘points,’ are a necessary element of any rail network. However, they often prove to be performance-limiting elements of networks. A novel concept for rail track switching has been developed as part of a UK research project with substantial industrial input. The concept is currently at the demonstrator phase, with a scale (384 mm) gauge unit operational in a laboratory. Details of the novel arrangement and concept are provided herein. This concept is considered as an advance on the state of the art. This paper also presents the work that took place to develop the concept. Novel contributions include the establishment of a formal set of functional requirements for railway track switching solutions, and a demonstration that the current solutions do not fully meet these requirements. The novel design meets the set of functional requirements for track switching solutions, in addition to offering several features that the current designs are unable to offer, in particular to enable multi-channel actuation and rail locking, and provide a degree of fault tolerance. This paper describes the design and operation of this switching concept, from requirements capture and solution generation through to the construction of the laboratory demonstrator. The novel concept is contrasted with the design and operation of the ‘traditional’ switch design. Conclusions to the work show that the novel concept meets all the functional requirements whilst exceeding the capabilities of the existing designs in most non-functional requirement areas.

Funding

The authors acknowledge the financial support provided by the United Kingdom EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the United Kingdom RSSB (Railway Safety and Standards Board) in grant number EP/I010823/1, for the project REPOINT: Redundantly engineered points for enhanced reliability and capacity of railway track switching.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit

Volume

231

Issue

9

Pages

1048 - 1065

Citation

BEMMENT, S.D. ...et al., 2017. Rethinking rail track switches for fault tolerance and enhanced performance. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit, 231(9), pp. 1048-1065.

Publisher

© IMechE 2016

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Acceptance date

2016-03-28

Publication date

2016-05-01

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by IMechE under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

ISSN

0954-4097

eISSN

2041-3017

Language

  • en

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