Rail Trackside

Rail Trackside

Solutions for Trackside Applications

Westermo have many years of experience in both data communication technologies and railway applications both trackside and on-board the rolling stock. Our real expertise is in developing products that can function in the harshest environments and meeting the toughest approval specifications.

Westermo is familiar with mission critical applications in many industries and has therefore developed products and techniques that meet the many specific needs of the rail industry. The patented Westermo FRNT protocol allows for the fastest ring recovery in Ethernet networks – 20 ms for a ring with 200 switches. Our Wolverine range is developed around a technology that allows the creation of Ethernet networks on old installed copper cables that can stretch for tens of kilometres along the trackside.

Westermo – A Worldwide Proven Track Record

In order to be used in the trackside environment Westermo products are tested to the EN 50121-4 Electromagnetic compatibility standard for emission and immunity of the signalling and telecommunications apparatus on railway applications. As well as this Westermo products operate in extreme temperature ranges –40 to +70°C (–40 to 158°F) and are built into robust compact housings making them ideal for panel mounting.

Solutions for the Trackside Applications

Trackside applications need data communication networks with an extremely high availability. As well as mechanical robustness the products must be resilient, secure and capable of supporting legacy protocols. The Westermo WeOS operating system, that drives our Redfox, Lynx, Wolverine and Viper families of products, has been developed by Westermo to ensure reliability and also provide a future proof solution.

Migration to IP connectivity

IP technology is becoming the de facto standard for trackside applications, however the barrier to use is often the cost of new cable installation and the replacement of old, but reliable, serial devices. The Westermo Wolverine range of products can allow IP networks to operate over old copper twisted pair cabling allowing networks of many kilometres to carry data at rates sometimes over 15 Mbit/s.

The WeOS operating system also has extensive serial to IP conversion options which allows old protocols to be encapsulated and routed via the IP backbone.

Find out more about the Wolverine series

Ethernet as a replacement for SDH

In railway signalling, two different migrations take place at the same time. Apart from the migration from legacyIP systems, Ethernet systems now also have the capability to replace large parts of existing SDH systems (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy). In case of an increased density of trackside equipment, no additional SDH nodes are needed since Industrial Ethernet equipment is able to offer the needed availability, using either layer 2 redundancy and/or layer 3 dynamic routing.

Whichever need you have, from simple 25 year-old FSK serial technology up to complex routing across different media, Westermo has it all to support you in offering a complete solution for complex and demanding environments.

Find out more about the RedFox series

Ensuring network availability with multiple high bandwidth protocols

Long distance transmission of IP Video over existing backbone systems makes it possible to selectively monitor trackside cameras without draining the systems bandwidth when cameras are not monitored.

In the same way, it is possible to ‘broadcast’a single stream over the network and make it available to an unlimited number of viewers, using only a single stream to each network node. With the implementation of IGMP Snooping and redundancy protocols supported in WeOS, Westermo is able to offer an IP CCTV and IP multicasting solution based on any kind of media. Whether it is copper, fibre, or interstation transmission over SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) backbones, WeOS offers all the protocols needed to build and manage the network solution.

Find out more about the Lynx series