Pretoria - The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) has awarded the Thales-Maziya Consortium a contract to install new signalling in the Western Cape.
The contract, which is valued at R1.865 billion, will include the establishment of the new Cape Town Train Traffic Control Centre, the design, construction and installation of the new railway signalling system and the associated civil, Perway (bridges and platforms), electrical and telecommunication works.
The contract is part of Prasa’s national new rail signalling programme aimed at modernising the agency’s rail assets.
Prasa will use this financial upgrade in its aging signalling and telecommunication infrastructure.
This will include replacing all existing signalling interlockings, which consist mainly of obsolete mechanical and electro-mechanical systems, with state-of the-art electronic interlockings for future rail operations.
Currently, only 23 of the 162 signalling installations across the Prasa network have not exceeded their design life. The rest of the signalling averages 35 years in age and is at the end of its life cycle.
The scope of the national new signalling programme will include the replacement of 162 signalling installations, as well as the installation of optical fibre cable networks in the Metrorail Regions as part of the overall Integrated Communication System (ICS) programme.
This will allow telecommunication links between the various signal relay rooms and the regional train traffic control centres.
Prasa is also addressing the current uni-directional signalling, which causes huge disadvantages to operational flexibility and corridor capacity as maintenance activities or fault conditions occur on one line.
Subsequently, Metrorail, Prasa’s rail operator, experiences major delays on the system and train backlogs due to passenger trains trapped behind failed train sets that need to be cleared from the line before continuing with normal operations.
At the heart of the signalling programme is the need to guarantee passenger safety and operational efficiency, which is largely dependent on rail signalling.
The unavailability of spares due to the age of the rail signalling has made it increasingly impossible to perform maintenance and fault finding duties.
Prasa’s objectives in implementing its national new signalling programme are to increase safety, reliability and flexibility of the network, reduce human error factors and to increase the capacity of the network in order to improve train headways and on-time train performance.
In April 2011, Prasa awarded Siemens a R1.1 billion signalling contract for Gauteng Stage 1. The contract focused on the installation of the New Gauteng Nerve Centre and the design, construction and installation of 18 new railway signalling systems.
This also included the associated civil, Perway and the electrical and telecommunication works for the Gauteng South Region.
Prasa awarded Bombardier Africa Alliance the KwaZulu-Natal new signalling contract in March 2013.
The contract is worth approximately R1.865 billion and will focus on the installation of the New Prasa Centralised Traffic Control in Rossburgh.
The contract also includes the design, construction and installation of the new railway signalling system and the associated civil, Perway, electrical and telecommunication works for the Durban region. - SAnews.gov.za
