Challenge
The state-of-the-art control room of the Sydney Rail Operations Center (ROC), built in 2018, was designed to consolidate and improve the efficiency of monitoring Sydney’s rail network — housing 104 transit dispatchers/controllers and integrating over 25 functionally different roles in one location. Prior to building the ROC, dispatchers operated and monitored the nearly 506 miles of track from six control centers. Inside the new architectural gem, a custom-made NanoLumen 41-million-pixel LED video wall — nicknamed the “WOW” board — measuring roughly 106 x 12 feet (32.5m x 3.65m), needs to display rail network content from over 40 sources, such as day of operation (DoO) information. The massive room also features numerous workstations, where incoming data from every source can be dynamically reconfigured on individual workstations to best suit the control staff’s duties. In addition, the organization’s other active control centers within the rail network need to seamlessly operate the smaller video walls installed at each site.
The scope and size of the operation demanded a video wall management solution that could accelerate and simplify the access, exchange, and management of information between operational staff, so that they can respond to and resolve incidents faster. For the AV integrator, such a large deployment demanded a system that can be quickly installed and configured in order to meet the delivery deadlines.
Solution
To optimize control room efficiency and visualization, Critical Room Solutions, the AV integrator for the Sydney Rail project, turned to VuWall. The massive video wall is controlled by the VuScape VS640 video wall controller, with an additional VS640 controller in each of the five other control centers to drive their respective video walls. VuScape was selected for its powerful processing and graphics, its easy-to-use video wall management software, and its ability to easily streamline potentially unlimited number of sources. VuScape’s ease of deployment optimized the onsite installation and configuration phase, meeting Critical Room Solutions’ delivery deadlines.
Results
VuWall’s video wall management system is now keeping the Sydney Rail Operations Center on track, ensuring that the rail lines are running smoothly. With a single vendor solution to manage all the workstations and the video walls seamlessly, the ROC relies on VuScape for accuracy and flexibility in its 24/7 operations centers. The ROC is now one of the most sophisticated, data-driven, and ergonomically designed operations control centers in the world. This state-of-the-art deployment sets a new standard for other mega-city transit systems.
“Sydney Trains serves more than 32 million passengers every month. Numbers like that require a sophisticated and powerful system capable of keeping an eye on the entire network, and VuWall is at the heart of this mission-critical operation. As these numbers continue to rise, we know we can trust the VuWall ecosystem to keep us accurately informed, so we can continue to provide the best commuter experience to our customers.”
Geoff Howard, Sydney Trains ROC Program Director
About Transport Sydney Trains
Sydney Trains is the suburban passenger rail network serving the city of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The network is a hybrid suburban-commuter rail system with a central underground core. Sydney Trains also operate the Rail Operations Centre and are responsible for the maintenance of assets including tracks, trains, signals, overhead wiring, stations and facilities. Sydney Trains Rail Operation Centre (ROC) Sydney Trains has been operating all suburban rail services across metropolitan Sydney since 2013. Its services cover 815km across 178 stations on 9 lines, with metro-equivalent train frequencies of every 3 minutes. Sydney Trains also maintains trains and a large proportion of the infrastructure used by NSW TrainLink.
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