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Will the Westinghouse tortoise beat the Euro hares in the CBI race?
There was a lot to see and and lot of chums to meet at Railtex in November. And the ‘Smug Gits of the Show' Award goes to my chums from rural Wiltshire.
Across the full width of the stand was an array of visual display units showing the track layout of the West Coast Main Line out of Euston. And behind this demonstration of Westinghouse's control system sat a small cubicle containing a Westlock Computer Based Interlocking. Sorry, <ital>fourth generation<ital> CBI.
And this Westlock CBI was single-handedly running the timetable for the four busiest SSI modules in the Willesden signalling scheme. That is, a potential 431 routes controlled thropugh 126 signals, 140 point ends 254 track circuits. This still left the Westlock module with spare capacity, I was told.
Westlock uses SSI architecture ported into a Triconex vital safety processing system. As with SSI there is two out of three majority voting for redundancy and I was encouraged to pull one of the modules and watch the other two carrying on running the WCML.
Then Westinghouse really got my attention, with the news that Westlock has been selected for Phase 1 of the Cherwell Valley scheme, with commissioning due for the 2004 summer timetable. I knew that the company was in line for Cherwell Valley , but assumed it would be SSI.
‘What about acceptance', I asked?
‘On schedule', said the SMs
‘Where have you got to on the schedule'?
All they would say was that the Acceptance Strategy and the Acceptance Plan had been endorsed by the Systems Review Panel.
Given the acceptance delays to all the other CBIs (this column ad nauseam) the timescale seemed a touch heroic. But some subsequent beavering around revealed that the SRA and Network Rail had commissioned and reviewed an independent assessment of the acceptance timescale by before the decision was confirmed.
This seemed to confirm what a chum on the Stand told me. ‘We have had a lot of experience with safety cases, including the Westrace interlocking and we know the processes to follow'. More important is the backwards compatibility to SSI.
Cherwell Valley Phase 1 covers Leamington Spa to Banbury (both exclusive). Effectively the mechanical signal box at Fenny Compton is being replaced. Nominal capacity will then be 12 trains an hour, with capacity for 15 and 3 minute headways.
This is, of course, a pretty hairy location for a pilot, since the work is being funded from the West Coast Route Modernisation to provide relief capacity when blockades are in force. Nice to see that despite the serial disappointments with CBI people are still prepared to take big decisions.