REGISTER

Phillip Jordan BE (Civil), M Eng Sc. – Principal

Consultant, Road Safety International; formerly Principal Road Safety Engineer, VicRoads.

The use of red flashing lights (signals) and boom barriers at rail crossings has been a widely accepted practice in Australia since the 1920's. These devices have an excellent safety record, but are expensive to install.

The State of Victoria now has an annual budget of $6 million for upgrading level crossings from passive to active control. In the 1990's this figure was a low as $600,000. That figure allowed just 4 or 5 crossings to be upgraded from passive to active each year. The present budget results in some 15 road crossings and a handful of pedestrian crossings being upgraded annually. But even now, with some 1500 passive level crossings in the State, it will take the best part of another century to provide active level crossing protection at all sites. Of course, many of these 1500 sites are very low volume crossings, and the use of large amounts of public money at such crossings may well be difficult to justify.

This situation caused a group of road and rail engineers to investigate the possibilities of reducing the cost of level crossing protection through the use of lower cost (but still 100% reliable) detection devices and warning signals. Their intention was not to replace the existing active device with a new low cost option, but rather to have an additional device which could be used to improve the conspicuity of selected passive crossings at the time that a train was in the vicinity.

After an international literature search, five detection units were submitted to a Stage 1 trial on a disused rail line in suburban Melbourne. The most reliable detector out of these five was then further tested during Stage 2 of the trial on a railway line near Ballarat in western Victoria. Finally, as Stage 3 of this trial, the prototype was installed at a passive level crossing at Creswick in western Victoria and monitored in real life situations.

This paper presents the history of this trial, together with some of the results of the trial, through the eyes of a road safety engineer. It outlines the key decisions which were made during the nine year long study and provides some guidance and advice for others who may be thinking of a similar trial. The paper details the decisions which lead to the design of the warning signal used to alert motor vehicle drivers of the presence of a train.

The outcome of the trial to date is very encouraging - VicRoads and Vic Track are now just months away from having a low cost level crossing warning device available for use on low volume roads in rural areas. Its final cost will be in the order of one fifth of the cost of conventional active control.