A major upgrade of the signalling on the Northern City line to Moorgate is underway, and will however see the line closed at weekends for the work to be carried out. The Northern City line has been chosen to start the rollout of the new signalling system which will eventually be deployed along the East Coast railway, and eventually, UK wide. The new system, the European Train Control System (ETCS), will allow Network Rail to remove lineside signalling and put all that information on a display screen inside the train cabs instead. Not only does that reduce the cost of a signalling system as there’s less hardware, there’s also a reduction in maintenance costs, as there are no longer any signals to maintain.
While good for Network Rail, the benefit for passengers is that they can also run trains closer together, depending on the signalling set-up, and with better oversight of where trains are on the network, the controllers can respond more rapidly to problems before they affect passengers.
ETCS was first used in the UK on the Cambrian line as a test deployment, and then on Thameslink in the central core of the network. It’s also one of the signalling systems being used on Crossrail. There’s now a plan to upgrade the entire East Coast Mainline railway, and that’s where the Northern City line comes in. Conveniently, it’s a simple line in railway terms and is also operated by GTR, which has experience from the Thameslink project. And the Northern City line recently started using a fleet of new trains, which were fitted with the in-cab equipment ready for the signalling upgrade.
Interesting, I had never thought of ETCS as a cost reduction, indeed I had always assumed it was actually more expensive, since more complex systems usually are.
Does it not require a large number of transmitters to function? especially in tunnels…
In any case, the increased flexibility, reduced headways etc etc must surely be a far larger benefit than any potential cost savings!
@DJL
You can do this kind of thing with a single leaky feeder cable… ETCS is built on “3G” technology.