52. RFID is now operational at McKinley Railway.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back to mckinley today i'm going to show you the next stage that we've got to with rfid just to recap for everybody here the last video we talked about how we had managed to successfully track trains and wagons at unprecedented levels of performance over the last the previous two years we've suddenly got it cracked with that company and what that rfid for us is you use it with your credit cards when you waft it into the pay machine at tesco's to pay for your milk and it got you what and you pay there that's rfid technology and what we're using rfid for is to track our wagons and our locomotives on the railway so what we have here is sheffield and this is the first place we've implemented rfid sheffield isn't a normal good yard or as such that you would have seen freight management this is a marshalling yard so trains come from all around the layout london birmingham manchester wakefield halifax they come here with train loads of wagons and they then have to be marshaled into sidings to be taken onwards to the the relevant destination so one train might come in to sheffield with wagons for birmingham and london there will be sidings designated for birmingham london here and the operators at this yard this marshalling yard have to break up the arriving train put the trains into the relevant tracks designated for those destinations and then at the appropriate time according to the timetable which we'll take you through in a minute they then have to pull those trains out put them in the departure tracks assemble it with the goods van and a locomotive and then the train controller software will take it away to the relevant destinations such as london or birmingham it's important to explain how sheffield works what the screen does and what how it's got to help the operators so let me take you through the yard physically and then what it looks like on the screen the main lines are here at the back we then have three arrival departure tracks these are the tracks that train controller will either deliver trains on or take them away from sheffield marshalling yard we then have eight in fact there are ten dead end sidings which are designated for destinations that the operators must put the wagons in there are six of them at this end and four of them at that end there that makes ten and this screen has the same information there are the three arrival departure tracks there are the four sidings oops down that end and then here are the six sidings at this end so a train arrives in and the operators then need to work out where do they put all these wagons because of course the problem with british railway stock is it's all small brown vans so this is where rfid comes in but you might ask how so let me paint out on the track where we use rfid to help the arrival departure tracks there is an rfid by the way i raided the the whole of my heating system to nick all these radiator caps there are three at this end of the arrival departure tracks i'm going to put these three here just so you get the idea there are three rfid antennas at that end of these same tracks we need two rfid antennas for these tracks because the tracks are bi-directional locomotives and trains and guardsmans can come on from and come into these tracks from either direction therefore we need to we then also have an rfid sensor at the entrance to all of the sidings at this the six sidings i talked about there and the four sidings i talked about here i can't reach that one so we'll just have to assume no i can flexible at my age so this is where we have the rfid antennas there are on the bottom of these wagons we run our trains in triplets we use triplets and we've talked about this before to reduce the amount of shunting work required when we have realistic looking trains coming into the yard so if you have 24 wagons coming into yard and you've got to marshal 24 wagons that will take nearly an hour of an operator's time if we close couple three of them permanently together and then marshall those round 24 divided by three is eight that's eight wagons that's 15 to 20 minutes max that makes the movement of of uh the shunting works um shorter for a given for longer looking trains so it's attempting to have some degree of realism but allowing for the realities of shunting time which is real time i it will take you five minutes we can't accelerate that and the rfid tags are here on the bottom of the middle wagon so i'm just going to leave those there so we have the rfid antennas here we have the siding here and this screen here has the same representation and because there are rfid antennas at the entrance to all these tracks and both ends of this one it will show us where the wagons are so what we're going to show you now is the train coming in to the yard it's been dispatched by the computer and we can see that it's arriving from edinburgh and i as the station manager have released the platform here so that's how it's allowed it and it also knows the orientation of where it's coming in the tracks that the train is coming along now will be hidden from the operators this is because they'll only see the main lines up to here all these tracks at the back are hidden from the viewing scene and we'll have demountable scenery so that we can get access if we need it but there's very little point work in these tracks so the train is going down the back and what we expect to see is it starts to come into sheffield from a freight manager perspective as it goes over that rfid antenna on the track for ad2 which is where i have assigned a path you will see the icons of the models pop up we should see a locomotive and on this train there are three triplets and a breakdown the computer will bring it in and slow it down the way train controller does it goes to a crawl speed and then we break for the er dot here when it goes over that that causes the train to stop the computer is linked or rather the database is linked with train control and loconet so when it went over the ur top and the schedule finished the computers the train controller software sorry sent out a message to the database to say the schedule is finished the schedule then release the platform into shunt mode so what do i have here in ad2 track ad2 in the yard at sheffield i have a locomotive and if you can see that actually the front of the locomotive is in the rear the fan is on the rear and that's correctly shown and then we have three triplets and a break fan one two three we've got these pieces of sticky tape on them just so that we in tesmo can see that everything's behaving in terms of counts of triplets these triplets are numbered here fc 32 fu 22 and fu 21 what you won't have seen and i'll show you in a second is that on the sides of all of these triplets is small numerical numbers so that the operators can associate this here says break 63 there is a 63 and with these three triplets here we can now see that our job is to marshal or to shunt those three triplets one on a train back to edinburgh that's the software in test mode here one on to carlisle and one to york the destinations are hypothetical and just to quickly show you what these side decals look at here is one of those here and you can see that this test set that i was showing you earlier is fv45 it's a freight train it's a van set and it's number 45 in the van set so this screen shows us what is where what we have to do and that's what this screen was designed to do it's a freight manager's screen so the first thing i'm going to do is lock out the station from the computer being able to drive trains and the fast the first task i'm going to do is take the locomotive off the front of the train and into the refuge down here then i'll then bring it out and take it to the engine shed afterwards but for the purposes of this right now i'm now just going to set the points and i'm going to move her forward the engine will go over the rfid antenna and we would expect to see it disappear from the track in fact it's done that if you look at the freight manager screen so now i'm going to uncouple the engine press the uncoupler button and then move the engine forward into the refuge the next thing i'm going to do is bring the shunter out of the master headshot and pull the whole train out including the brake van forward i'm not sure this is particularly prototypical but for expediency purposes you'll see it being moved out and then i will put the brake van into the brake van siding here so i'm going to set the route and bring the shunter through you notice we set the root things here so it saves us all the complications of having to set all the individual points through double slips which are a bit of a challenge so the train is pulling these vans out and you'll notice that they start to disappear from this track but where they've got to go has been left because this is the actions that i as the shunter have got to perform i'm pulling them out to the master headshot and you'll start to see the wagons appear in the master headshot now i hadn't talked about an rfid reader there but for operators it's a great assist if they can see that now that train is in there so we have another rfid reader in the master headshot and from here what i'm now going to do is set the path and what i will do at this point here the train hasn't visually left the head shunt because we haven't put it anywhere else but what i have got is the brake van has appeared in the brake van yard track and that's because there is an rfid reader at both ends of that what i will then do is uncouple it so now my task i've got one track to go one wagon to go in west eight and two wagons to go in the east yard if i look at this 32 and 22 so i've actually got quite an interesting challenge because the middle set has got to go um into the west yard so what i'm going to do is move the first of these wagons fc fc 32 and i'm going to put it in east 2 track east 2 is where it's going to get deposited and what i do here is i bring it over the un coupler and i do the uncoupled shuffle which we've talked about before slow it down a bit further there we go east two press the uncouple shuffle oh it's delicious these two well i never who would have thought eh east to well i never we've done this time after time after time after time week after week and as soon as i'm showing you on camera here it just goes wrong every flipping time oh don't you just love model railways we'll try one more time for a bit of luck although i'm going to use the hand of god here and get it positioned in the middle of it this is when i start to get irritated with my trendset so now we pull the remaining two triplets away you can see that that wagon has gone into the edinburgh line now what i've got to do is the exchange track the way we work this yard is we have wagons that are when we want to change yards when we want to basically give a wagon to the west yard versus the east yard we have this track in the middle called the exchange track so the east facing shunter which is east is that way to the left he will deposit that triplet set in here and the west shunter will come and pick it up and place it in meanwhile the east hunter can get on with placing his final triplet in the relevant track for his area it worked and then my final tracks got to go to east three so i'll set the route there and i will push the train down into e3 this is fu 21 there's something good about that number isn't there and you see so my job is east shunter has been done i can go away and park in my head shunt and i could then move the engine into the engine shed and i can let the west shunter do his job which is to finish putting that wagon that's in the exchange tracks fu 22 it's sitting here and he will toe that out and push that into west eight and that would be the job that the operators do here and as you can see we're starting to fill the trains up for edinburgh and for carlisle and they will appear when the station manager sets the train to go in say 20 minutes prior to departure he will put it up here and the operators will get busy pulling the relevant wagons out of the relevant track from the specific side of either the left or the right side the east and west yards and putting it into the rival departure track topping and tailing it with the guards van and the locomotive and then assigning it over to train controller to take the train away to london to birmingham to the staging yard etc so you can see we've still got a bit of work to do especially with our uncouplers i can't believe these things we spent hours polishing them anyway such is life so to try and summarize it for you i hope what you've seen here is we've demonstrated freight management with british outlying stock using rfid as an enabling technology and using a database screen to as an enabling technology the operators don't have to do anything specifically and this is all way bill centric i.e in other words people have used cars on our screens it would tell you where that train's got to go what's inside it if you if you're curious and i hope that that gives you some idea the other thing that's worth just catching up on is to explain why this is sitting here and what we're doing so this is the first panel which we've described in previous videos that will be mounted on the wall up over there it will have an identical twin because sheffield is big it will have an identical twin over here on this wall and that will allow the two shunting operators to basically be able to manipulate the points at both ends of the yard there will be three operators at sheffield there is the engine shed manager stroke station master or yardmaster is the one that sets the trains up is watching the timetable and interfacing with the external world and his duties will be to take engines in and out of the shed and also to manage as i said the timetables and he will be using his ipad you've seen the ipad before we have a sheffield version of that the operators will be using the panels to set the routes in the yard the station manager can also do that if he needs to mess around in the engine shed and this is a the freight manager screen so that represents all the technology that we're going to be using at each of our stations and yards around the layout which is control panels a freight manager screen which is static and a station manager ipad so i don't think there's any more to say today it's working progress i hope you've enjoyed what you've seen today and i look forward to sharing an update with you soon and thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: McKinley Railway

Views: 10,295

Rating: 4.9728355 out of 5

Keywords: McKinley Railway, McKinley model railway, RFID, David Townend, Traincontroller, Train controller, Digitrax, Model railway operation, mckinley, Charlie Bishop, Chadwick Model Railway, Building a model railway, model railway, model railway building, Hades, Freight trains, Expanding freight operations, moving freight

Id: DXXYqRamxng

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021