202307 – McGrath & Tivan – The V/Line Core Data Network Upgrade and the Digital Railway Transformation

Like many long-lived railways, V/Line works with a collection of inherited, evolved and entangled legacy communications equipment. Starting in 2009, the Regional Rail Link (RRL) project cleaned up a substantial section of the TCP/IP network, providing a core and distribution data network architecture for the central area and two corridors – appropriate for the era.

Over time, other projects added more end equipment and emerging technologies demanded more bandwidth. Each addition was within that project’s scope, but none assessed the impact on the core.

A trigger for change was the addition of just one more stabling yard in 2021. The data network symptoms were quite significant: first intermittent, then cascading faults demonstrated that the ‘faulty component’ model of maintenance had run its course, and no particular component was “offending”; instead it was the underlying network architecture that was no longer up to the task of managing the higher traffic flow of the increasingly digital railway.