Signaling Power Cabinets for Charleroi Tramway Network

Context

End of 2018, the Belgian company in charge of public transport operator for Wallonia, TEC, announced the complete renovation of its tramway fleet (45 vehicles) and 6 stations. This renovation is spread over a period of 5 years.

The renewal of the signaling system for the Charleroi light rail system has just been awarded to the Alstom-SPIE Belgium consortium. Alpha Innovations, supplier of Alstom for many years, has been chosen for the conception, delivery and commissioning of signaling cabinets.

Challenges

Alpha Innovations will provide signaling cabinets that will be along the tracks to control the position of the tramway. These cabinets are made of:

Modules that are receiver and transmitter which detect the presence of the tramway on the track
One UCC which collects the information and send the data to a centralized control and do predictive and preventive maintenance
Necessary space for the connections with external equipment

The particularity of this project is that some stations has not been used for many years and the other one needed to be modernized. Therefore, we needed to adapt our solution to an existing infrastructure and that’s our specialty! Moreover, our monitoring solution inside the UCC enables the end-user to have a better control, better safety and more efficient maintenance.

What’s next?

End of 2022, the first cabinets was delivered for the pilot line. The TEC expects to have everything up and running in five years and by this time more than 30 cabinets will be delivered for this specific application.