On Friday 8 April eleven members of the Institution or Railway Operators visited the Thames Valley Signalling Centre at Didcot. This was the Area’s second trip to this location having also visited it the previous year just before the centre was commissioned.
The group had the opportunity to view the signalling work stations on the operations floor, discuss the working with the supervisors and signallers on duty and try their hand on a signalling simulator, located in the same building.
The Thames Valley Signalling Centre now controls the area which was previously covered by the Reading panel signal box. The latter is now being decommissioned in connection with the remodelling of the Reading station and immediate areas.
There are three work stations currently on the operations floor controlling the Berks and Hants lines, Cholsey to Reading West junction and Reading station to Ruscombe junction (including the Henley branch). The signallers demonstrated the different means of calling routes, the use of Automatic Route Setting (ARS) and variation in displays that the work stations can offer, as well as fielding a number of questions about the operations of the new signalling system.
In the simulator room, as well as hands on experience of operating an IECC work station, the various means of simulated equipment failure and alarms were demonstrated, including the unique SPAD alarm. The simulator is supplied by TRE at Heywood near Westbury. It’s a computer based replica of the main signalling centre equipment, giving the opportunity to train signallers of the operation of the equipment, then to assess them in various modes of operations including failures and types of perturbed working, before they take control of the ‘live’ signalling system.
Currently the work stations in the Thames Valley Signalling Centre covers a small proportion of the operations floor, with space for expansion for the centre to take on the areas covered by Slough IECC, Slough panel, Swindon ‘B’ IECC, Swindon ‘A’ panel as well as Oxford panel and CCTV monitoring of level crossings currently worked by Causeway, Kintbury and Colthrop crossings.
The IRO SW&W would like to thank Pat Crowther (Local Operations Manager), Bob Whittle (Shift Supervisor) and Kevin Hogan (Shift Supervisor) along with the other staff on duty for their assistance and for making the visit most enjoyable, interesting and informative.