Insight into the condition of rail infrastructure and rolling stock is essential to good maintenance. Strukton Rail provides a full and real-time insight into the status of rail systems. POSS is the preventive maintenance and failure diagnosis system developed by Strukton.
London Victoria is the second busiest railway terminus in London after Waterloo.
It was opened the 1st of October 1860. There are actually two separate stations:
The eastern side (platforms 1 – 8) for services to Kent, and the western side
platforms 9 – 19) for services to Surrey and Sussex, including Gatwick Airport and Brighton.
Due to the busy train services, the points in the London Victoria area have to endure much. Point number 228 for instance performs far over 80,000 runs a year. It is obvious that most point failures lead to severe train service disruptions at this station.
For this reason Network Rail decided mid 2008 to introduce a POSS point monitoring system on 38 points. These 38 points, that have been connected to POSS, have either HW drives or Clamp Lock drives. Both types are powered by 110 V DC. Most points have a mechanical back drive. All points at London Victoria are controlled from a central relay room. This makes it possible to monitor all points by just one local POSS unit. This so-called BasePOSS unit can
monitor up to 70 points. POSS measures the motor current of the point drives, the direction of the run and the outside temperature. This data is sent via GPRS to the POSS server in the Netherlands.
The Network Rail maintenance engineers have real time access to the data by using a web interface on their pc or mobile devices. Network Rail foresees a major rise of the importance of condition monitoring as part of the “Intelligent Infrastructure” that is going to be implemented in the near future on the rail network of Britain. At busy stations like London Victoria in particular, the prevention of point failures and the reduction of the MTTR is of great importance to guarantee a reliable train service.
Download projectblad POSS London Victoria Station.