Clarification of signalling railway terminology

[Sarah Pawton]

Hi,

I was hoping for some clarification wrt different kinds of signals and other things present on the railway. I've been (perhaps, bravely) working with the TPS dataset and I've found the following types of elements on the railway:

• Stop Board
• Buffer Stop
• Speed Board
• 2-Aspect Colour Light (IECC)
• 2-Aspect Colour Light (Pannel)
  
• 3-Aspect Colour Light (IECC)
• 3-Aspect Colour Light (Pannel)
• 4-Aspect Colour Light (IECC)
• 4-Aspect Colour Light (Pannel)
• Ground Position Light
• Semaphore Shunting Signal
• Home/Starter Semaphore
• Phone for Authorisation
• Limit of Shunt
• Switch Diamond
• Switch

Aside from the 2/3/4 aspect colour lights (I think I can take a guess), can you explain what the other elements represent? Additionally, what do "freeingtime" and "settime" represent?

Additionally, if you could point me to any other resources wrt TPS, that would be very helpful—right now I've just been flying blind with the XSD and nothing else to go off of.

--

Sarah Pawton   (en she/they/it, cy nhw/eu) srh.dog

[Evelyn Snow]

Hi Sarah,

I'd recommend reading RS521. It's available online (you'll have to create a RSSB account, but it's
free to do so):
https://www.rssb.co.uk/standards-catalogue/CatalogueItem/rs521-iss-9

If you'd like a physical copy, that's also an option:
https://www.willsonshop.com/products/signals-handsignals-indicators-signs-issue-9

You may also find this old BR training video rather helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAO3JbXYRnI

Evelyn

> [logo] Sarah Pawton [polyam] [trans]

[Evelyn Snow]

Now realising I've failed to address the TPS-specific points!

I'm not certain what "freeingtime" and "settime" represent, my suspicion is that it's to do with
the time it takes to set and clear a route on a panel, since neither can be done instantaneously,
and when planning a train's schedule around the movements of other trains, this would be useful
information.

I'm afraid there's no resources for TPS other than the schema at present. I've considered writing
some documentation on the wiki for the parts that I have worked out, but haven't yet got around to
doing so.

It'll probably be helpful to have a look at the sectional appendix. The information held in TPS is
in some ways comparable to this, since it's also a logical map of the railway network.
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/industry-and-commercial/information-for-operators/national-electronic-sectional-appendix/

It's also useful to understand that that a lot of the information in TPS is intended to be
visualised, rather than representing any sort of useful machine-readable information.

I've attached a visualisation I made of Huddersfield while working there last year.

The faintly visible circles are node elements. The black lines joining their centres are from edge
elements, all visible text is graphictext, grey lines are graphicvector. I've edited the CSS to not
draw polyarea, since these aren't styled, but they are present.

There's not much useful I can say about the other elements, but for a node:
- netx and nety are the coordinates for visualisation
- kmregionid refers to an ELR defined in kmregionmasterdesc
- kmvalue refers to the mileage of the node, represented in metres.
- secondkmregionid and secondkmvalue refer to a second ELR and mileage, if applicable

Evelyn