Sabik – Pioneering LED Technology for Railway Signaling
Sabik Products – The Chosen Option
Sabik’s products have been the chosen option for railway signaling in Finland. The first major project in delivering LED signals to Finnish railways was implemented between 2006 and 2012 in Helsinki, when Ilmala railway yard went through a complete renovation and modernization.
Ilmala is the biggest marshalling yard in Finland and most of the maintenance and repair on the long-distance passenger trains an all of the maintenance on the commuter stock is carried out at Ilmala railway yard. This significant project lasted for over 6 years and the work was implemented in several stages divided into 12 segments: all old structures were removed, the stability of soil mass was improved, all track superstructure was renewed, and all traffic control and safety systems were rebuilt.
A prerequisite for smoothly running train traffic is that everything functions well at Ilmala, so that trains can arrive punctually at Helsinki central railway station and start their day’s operations from there.
Sabik – The First To Provide LED
In the early 21st century, there was not much LED technology in the railway crossings and Sabik was one of the first ones to provide LED signals for railways to be used to control trains.
The dawn of LED signaling era in railways was proceeded with vigorous testing and pilot projects in which Sabik was intensely involved. After several tests and pilots it was concluded that LED signal units from Sabik would suit well to the railway use and would be the next step in the railway safety.
Sabik was also the first to design a stainless steel housing for shunting signals to be used for railway signaling in Finland.
A Completely New Product Designed
Sabik designed a LED signal unit called RO100 to match exactly our customer’s Mipro’s control unit. Sabik RO100 LED signals were utilizing the same Railway Logic Controller unit as which was the heart of the earlier TRV200 LED unit. Mipro had already previously used TRV200 LED unit in railroad crossings for guiding the road traffic.
This way Sabik’s RO100 signal unit complemented the existing products and suited well for train traffic controlling.
Finland Ahead of LED Technology Thanks to Sabik
With Sabik products and through this project Finland jumped straight away to be one of the first countries in the world to exploit the new LED technology in the railways in a larger scale.
The Ilmala depot has been operative during the whole construction phase and the implementation schedule has been fixed according to the use of the railway.
The coordination of the work in the whole project has been successful and the traffic impacts due to the construction work, in terms of delays in the train traffic, have been minimal.
