Data Connectivity to Stations

[Dai Corner]

Journeycheck is currently showing the following for Cheltenham Spa (my bold)

Due to a fault with the internet the following faults have been reported:
The ticket office is unable to accept debit or credit cards.
Ticket Vending Machines are not working.
Please purchase tickets at the first available opportunity to do so when no other means of purchasing them is available at the station.
Additionally, the Customer Information Screens are not working.

I'd always assumed that the railway used its own data network but the above implies that Cheltenham, at least, uses the public Internet.

Can anyone working in S&T or IT tell us more about how it's done, both for safety critical things like signalling and others like CIS and retail systems?

 

[Tempest Malice]

From a signalling side, no scheme I have yet been involved with has connected anything to the internet, or even in some cases not even to any external network at all.

NR's FTN (fibre transmission network) is used for connections to the lineside from signalboxes (links to remote interlockings etc.), but it is not internet connected from a data point of view (I have no ides if the FTN's own control may be internet accessible or not).
The safety critical side (interlocking to the signals/points/train detection) similarly is definitely not let near the internet, with dedicated trackside networks if not direct analogue cabling used for this depending on distances involved.

The closest to the internet you get with signalling systems normally is getting the timetable in for routesetting systems, which is nowadays done via a connection to the internal equivalent of NR's open data feeds, which is over their internal network not the internet (note older systems used to connect directly to the timetable producing system over the internet, but this is being phased out).

Finally as for CIS systems, whilst your Cheltenham example indicates they use the internet within themselves, signalling systems don't connect to them directly, but instead link via serial links over dedicated phone lines into NR's "SMART" system (afraid I don't remember the acronym), which takes train describer (TD) messages (including state of railway ones when the TD has been configured to produce these), and then it passes them on to everyone (not sure how as I'm not involved in that side of it), including open data feeds, CIS, and other internal users.
And as an aside SMART also works out train timings at locations based on fixed offsets from the time of the TD message (i.e. it's the system that produces the time saying your train arrived 29 1/2 minutes late rather than 30 as it calculates the arrival time as a fixed (per location) number of seconds since the signal before the station is passed when the train might actually go slower)

 

[robert thomas]

Journeycheck is currently showing the following for Cheltenham Spa (my bold)



I'd always assumed that the railway used its own data network but the above implies that Cheltenham, at least, uses the public Internet.

Can anyone working in S&T or IT tell us more about how it's done, both for safety critical things like signalling and others like CIS and retail systems?

Neath station had the same problem yesterday.

 

[Commstech]

Possibly the card payment machines are connected to the internet with everything else via NR network.

 

[Geeves]

Many of the times when these ticket office messages appear its issues at the vendors end, IE Fujitsu servers have an issue or the card payment providers have an issue rather than the station itself. I guess its easier to put an message out saying internet.

 

[aleggatta]

it's an interesting one. The depot I worked at needed an internet upgrade when moving from paper work orders to iPads, and it was apparently a real faff as they needed to lay a new fibre from the station over an authorised walking route (where the existing fibre was already laid). I failed to see why they couldn't simply get a new fibre straight off the street from BT and give the depot a dedicated link to 'public' internet for our needs(it was completely possible from a commercial stance, the new software was completely cloud based and independant of any NR equipment from our terminals). as it was openreach ended up running a new fibre from the station and problem solved, but it took a long time to resolve.

 

[Annetts key]

Network Rail IT and Network Rail S&T / Network Rail Telecoms are independent of one another most of the time.

In the past (BR), the Telecom part of the S&T carried nearly all the railway data over the extensive telecommunications network. Now it is a shadow of what it once was.

Most data and IT systems are now provided via Network Rail IT, which often does not use any of the railway telecommunications systems.

ALL vital safety critical signalling systems either use their own dedicated networks running on Network Rail owned and operated cables and equipment. Or use private cables and equipment (that may include infrastructure owned or operated by operators that took over parts of BRT). The public internet is not used.

It’s similar with voice communications such as signal box telephones, block bells, emergency alarms, SPTs and other operational telephones.

Occasionally telephone links in remote locations may be provided by commercial telecommunications companies such as BT. If a dedicated line is not provided, the equipment in the exchange is configured to ring the signalboxes ‘public’ “dial” telephone number.

A lot of stations, both for the CIS and other systems, only use commercial systems, which often do use the World Wide Web.