Invensys Rail Commissions World’s First Westrace MkII Interlocking in Auckland

Sports fans visiting this year’s Rugby World Cup in New Zealand are set to have smoother and faster journeys to and from Auckland’s impressive Eden Park Stadium after Invensys Rail completed the latest phase of the city’s commuter rail upgrade works on May 16.

The Auckland project involves the world’s first installation of Invensys Rail’s next generation WESTRACE MkII interlocking, which delivers powerful and high speed vital processing, greatly increased capacity, hot-swap operation and hot standby capability. Now in revenue earning service, WESTRACE MkII will play a crucial role in transporting many thousands of rugby fans to and from Eden Park Stadium during the Rugby World Cup in September and October this year.

Installation of WESTRACE MkII on KiwiRail’s network has provided a long list of benefits including high system availability; flexible architecture, simple plug and play maintenance; fast system configuration and minimal operational delays.

James Clendon, KiwiRail’s Project Director is delighted with the new WESTRACE MkII installation saying that: “The railway is running a lot better. The incidence of signalling failures has greatly reduced and the WESTRACE MkII is showing impressive post commissioning reliability.”

Signal Project Manager for the Auckland Electrification Project, Myles Radford, commenting on the newly delivered system said: “It’s more versatile, faster operating, easier to maintain and more reliable. I’d like to thank the KiwiRail signals team and Invensys Rail’s team of engineers from Australia and Spain for, once again, their great effort in getting this commissioning completed on time and without incident.”

Invensys Rail Senior Vice President of Engineering Owen Traynor commented: “This is a fantastic milestone for Invensys Rail and a great achievement for the whole team who have worked so hard over the past few years to make it possible. The collaboration, focus and hard work have been truly impressive and I want to personally thank everyone who has contributed to the achievement. This has very much been a team effort and collaboration on an impressive international scale.”

Invensys Rail, a division of the global technology company Invensys plc, employs over 4,000 people and is operational in over 30 countries around the world delivering state of the art railway control and communication solutions.

For more information on Invensys Rail’s systems and capabilities visit www.invensysrail.com.