Sydney Trains is putting wide band radios – “walkie-talkies” – back into service among its commuter rail crews, as a last resort backup in the event of another Digital Train Radio System (DTRS) outage.
At the beginning of March, an hour-long DTRS outage resulted in trains being halted at stations, with impactsed thousands of commuters stretching through the evening peak.
The March outage coincided with a DTRS upgrade, leading to speculation that the upgrade caused the outage.
The problem was attributed publicly to a network switch that failed, and which was isolated and replaced.
The DTRS was supposed to fail over to a backup system hosted at a Homebush data centre, but did not do so.
A Transport for NSW spokesperson told iTnews the upgraded DTRS is now operating “reliably with built-in redundancy”, but that it had decided to add “additional contingency for train crew to utilise wide band radio equipment if required.”
While deploying the radios for suburban rail operations didn’t require the purchase of additional radios, the organisation told iTnews “additional batteries have been purchased to ensure reliable operation of the wide band radios, should they be required.”
The DTRS outage also led to a temporary halt to all non-critical IT and other non-essential technology upgrades, the spokesperson said, but this had since been removed.
"Now that the system has been stabilised and operating reliably, normal processes for system changes apply," the spokesperson said.
