Selected Issues of Safe Operation of the Railway Traffic Control System in the Event of Exposition to Damage Caused by Lightning Discharges

Abstract

Lightning discharge becomes a serious source of interference and damage for electronic and electrical power systems. Safe and reliable operation of railway traffic control systems requires proper protection against the effects of lightning. However, the current standards on lightning protection, PN-EN/EN/IEC 62305, do not cover railway objects. Moreover, there are no other standards or recommendations dedicated to the railway. The paper is an attempt to apply the procedure of lightning risk management according to PN-EN 62305-2 to select the proper protection measures in railway objects. A case study for the signal box with installed relaying and digital stations of the railway traffic control system is analyzed. The analysis comprises calculations based on the current standard PN-EN 62305-2:2012 but including the issues specific to railway traffic control. The risks of lightning losses have been calculated for two cases: without lightning protection measures and with protection measures proposed to decrease the risks below the tolerable values. The results show that a practically effective solution to reduce the risks is applying surge protective devices with proper characteristics. Another way is replacing unshielded incoming lines with shielded ones of given shield bonding way, and supplementing it with surge protective devices when necessary.

Electromagnetic Impact of Overhead High-Voltage Lines during Power Transmission on Buried Signaling Cables of the Traffic Control Systems in Modernized Railway Lines

“…This allows the nature of the discharge, location, time, and peak value to be assessed and put together with the recorded behavior of electronic trackside devices, i.e., disturbances and damage to various sensors and occupancy control circuits. This should facilitate the cooperation of the specialists on surge protection and h infrastructure and manufacturers of trackside equipment in the development of more effective technical solutions [6,13,[16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

Selection of Surge Protection Module Components for Communication Lines Using a Genetic Algorithm

“…Train acceleration (as speed increases) also has an impact on the current observed [ 4 , 5 , 6 ] in the surrounding rail infrastructure. Obviously, the railway networks spread over a large area are usually well grounded, but they are also highly exposed to lightning issues [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ]. Such an environmental condition may cause serious damage to the infrastructure and also to the unprotected or weakly protected electronic devices.…”