201811 – Burton – Optimising ETCS for Busy Suburban Railways

The European Train Control System (ETCS) has now established itself globally as the train protection system of choice for many heavy rail networks. This is largely due to its open standards and multi-vendor support. ETCS was rolled out across the Auckland suburban rail network a few years ago, with the sole aim of improving safety. Following the introduction of ETCS, the safe working ecosystem of rules, signalling principles and ETCS configuration have been reviewed and optimised. Changes have been made for scenarios where it was identified that operational improvements could be attained without compromising safety.

This paper shares descriptions of some of the ETCS related improvements that have been successfully commissioned in Auckland. It is hoped that the successes of these changes in Auckland encourages other ETCS ‘owners’ to develop ideas for other improvements as well.

Changes made in Auckland, that are discussed, include: changes to the Driver’s rulebook, defensive driving strategies, warner route principles, enforcement of speed restrictions and the interaction with level crossings for stopping trains at stations. The paper is intended to give a high level engineering based description of some of these solutions and the reasons behind them.