Singapore’s main rail operator SMRT Trains and Thales have signed a collaboration agreement to establish a local repair facility for NSEWL on the rail operator’s premises at Bishan Depot to reduce repair turnaround time and improve cost efficiencies.
Thales has been installed the SelTrac CBTC signalling system on the North-South and East-West lines (NSEWL) and currently, critical circuit boards for the signalling equipment are produced and repaired by Thales at its dedicated facilities in Canada and France.
With this agreement, the rail experts of Thales will work closely with SMRT Trains’ Integrated Electronic Workshop to set up the repair facility for NSEWL. This includes training and transfer of expertise and technical know-how to enable technicians from SMRT Trains to diagnose and repair faulty components.
“With the establishment of the repair workshop at Bishan Depot, we aim to cut down repair turnaround time and cost. The use of digital technologies to preempt maintenance issues is also a key strategy for SMRT Trains as we strive to provide smooth journeys for commuters,” Lam Sheau Kai, President of SMRT Trains said.
On the digital sector, SMRT Trains and Thales have signed an agreement to jointly develop an intelligent rail analytics platform for the smart monitoring of rail signalling systems. Under this agreement, the engineers and experts of the two companies will organise a series of design thinking workshops to define specific use cases and identify key maintenance priorities.
The rail analytics platform, built upon Thales’ urban rail signalling, is a tailored digital platform that will leverage condition-monitoring devices, data analytics and cloud computing to automate the analysis of signalling system health and performance, and to identify and address potential maintenance issues before they occur. This will help to better manage engineering resources and improve systems reliability and performance.
The two agreements signed between SMRT Trains and Thales follow the recent announcement of a joint initiative by the partners called “The next – generation green CBTC project”, which aims to reduce electricity consumption and further improve traction energy efficiency of the NSEWL.
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