Railway switches and signals – Cab signal or train control – Magnetic rail
Patent
1984-10-23
1987-04-07
Caldwell, Sr., John W.
Railway switches and signals
Cab signal or train control
Magnetic rail
246182R, B61L 300
Patent
active
046554211
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
This invention relates to a method for transmitting information and/or commands between a ground station located in the vicinity of a railway track and a terminal located aboard a railway vehicle.
Fixed or switch selected visual signals are already known, but these have the disadvantage of being easily overlooked and of having no direct control upon the rail vehicle itself. Also known are signalling devices operating by electrical induction, but these have the disadvantage of being extraordinarily complex and are therefore used almost entirely for main lines only. Both types have limited information transmitting capacity and limited reliability.
It is task of the present invention to provide a method for transmitting information and/or commands to a rail vehicle which does not entail these disadvantages.
According to the present invention, this task has been solved by a method of the kind described in the introduction hereto, in that a plurality of transmitters and receivers are arranged one after the other in the longitudinal of the railway track, which upon the passage of the rail vehicle provided with a transcoder terminal cooperate individually and one after the other with this transcoder as coding elements of a coding group, and obtaining an information and/or command from the pulse sequence formed thus.
In this connection, it is desirable to use on the rail vehicle a transcoder having, locally separated from each other, at least one code feeder and one code scanner, and the coding group consists of a plurality of coding elements arranged one after the other in the longitudinal direction of the railway track, whereby each of these elements having a receiver and a transmitter coupled together and separated locally from each other.
In order to simplify installation, it is desirable that each coding element consists of a receiver and a transmitter which form a part of an oscillatory circuit which is tuned to the frequency of the rail vehicle transcoder and which draws its total energy requirement required for retransmission from the power transmitted by the transcoder. In order to avoid possible sabotage problems, and to avoid increasing the number of different signals to be transmitted, it is desirable for the transcoder or interrogator scanner to be tuned both to the frequency and to the phase of the code signal retransmitted relative to the signal transmitted by the transcoder.
For the purpose of differentiating the information or command, it is especially simple if the phase is altered as between the received and transmitted signal in the case of at least a part of the code elements of a code group. In this connection it is desirable always to alter the phase of at least one code element of a code group, by adjusting the transceivers for example by remote control or by hand. The further processing of the signals in a computer is simplified, if a binary signal system is used, by altering the phase difference between the received and transmitted code signal is either left unaltered or rotated through 180.degree. by the coding element.
In order to provide signals which are the same in both directions of travel, it is desirable for the code formed by a code group to be internally symmetrical.
To provide rugged coding elements and to eliminate, as far as possible, interference effects, it is desirable to operate with electro-magnetic induction transmission, the transcoder frequency selected being between 100 Hz and 100 KHz, and preferably not a harmonic of the frequency of electrical power used by the rail vehicle or of high tension lines in the vicinity of the track.
An extremely reliable system can be built up by using a fail safe coding group system, in which coding groups are used which transmit to the transcoder the distance to the next coding group and which initiates in the transcoder a monitoring of the arrival of a transmission from the next coding group at the predetermined location along the route.
In order to avoid major installation work, it is possible to arrange a coding group adjacent a vi
REFERENCES:
patent: 3787679 (1974-01-01), Birkin et al.
patent: 4038653 (1977-07-01), Brewster
patent: 4491967 (1985-01-01), Kobayashi et al.
Electronics, vol. 41, booklet 8, 15 Apr. 1968, New York (US), Electronic Abroad; "Track Record", p. 275.
Caldwell Sr. John W.
Okonsky David A.
Schellin Eric P.
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