Siemens Mobility Spain is one of the global centers of excellence inside Siemens in charge of developing ptc technology around the planet.
The PTC is a system specifically designed for monitoring and controlling train movements in order to stop a train before an accident can take place. In that sense, the specification is quite open and is part of the manufacturer companies to warranty the avoidance of the following points:
- Train collisions
- Derailments provoked by excessive speeds
- Movements of trains over wrong aligned switches
- No authorized entries in working areas
One of the main technical characteristics of the technology is that the localization system is based in the absolute positioning coming from GPS (Global Positioning System), reducing considerably the equipment installed on the track. This makes the PTC an ideal signaling technology for infrastructures with a big number of track kilometers and with difficult track installation access. In that sense, it is one of the preferred systems to equip railway freight infrastructures in countries were the ERTMS technology does not exist.
Siemens Mobility Spain is one of the global centers of excellence inside Siemens in charge of developing PTC technology around the planet. Siemens Mobility Spain is leading PTC projects all around the world including such remote places as Panama, Mozambique or Australia.
Inside the R&D innovation plan, it has been developed a tablet portable solution able to localize the maintenance workers and interconnect them with the PTC system. The Tablet Trainguard Sentinel, as it is known, uses an internal GPS chip integrated, able to solve the localization necessities. It also supports different Ethernet interfaces allowing the communication with the trains and the control center. This solution allows to increase the productivity of the maintenance workers distributed along the track as well as their safety. It is possible to block areas of the track and to apply temporary speed restrictions to the running trains as well as communicating in real-time with the railway operators. Moreover, all the information is online registered, allowing to track the field operations.
