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Peter Symons FIRSE General Manager

Bombardier Transportation (Signal) Australia Pty. Ltd.

This paper on Australasian Signalling is an introduction to whet the appetite for those travelling to Sydney for the 2002 International Conference, provides an update for those who have been before and show those who have never been what they are missing. Australia and New Zealand have a diverse range of practices and systems some home grown and many adapted from Europe and America. This paper provides a snapshot as at December 2001, of some of the continually developing Australasian (Australia and New Zealand) signalling and safeworking practices.

Australasia has an interesting mix of predominately British and North American derived signalling and safeworking practices. The huge distances meant that the evolution of signalling systems was fragmented resulting in different practices in each capital city, state and country.

In Australia, three very different systems are evident metropolitan and country, with country having either CTC or Dark Territory.

Metropolitan rail systems are characterised by being increasingly centrally controlled with train management systems, with computer based interlockings, full track circuiting and either route or speed signalling. Train protection systems range from none, to AWS, train stops and intermittent ATP CTC areas typically have route relay or CBI interlockings, colour light signalling, full train detection using coded track circuits, axle counters or conventional track circuits and asset protection systems such as dragging equipment detectors and hot box detectors. Some CTC has continuous ATP, Hammersly Iron or intermittent or intermittent with radio infill QR.

The Dark territories in the country and interstate are low volume railways using Train Order Working (TOW) and are increasingly using augmented train order systems such as DTC in Queensland and TMACS in New South Wales. This trend is likely to continue, promoted by Australian Rail Track Corporation interstate operations, eventually replacing TOW and CTC and all wayside equipment except point machines and grade crossing protection. This will lead one day...

- to a standard and uniform signalling and safeworking system that matches the standardisation of the gauge.