With its experience in industrial control operations, OCC offered invaluable support to an international leader in the design, construction, equipping, maintenance, management and renewal of rail assets and systems. As the UK's largest railway engineering contractor, with some 7,000 employees and an annual turnover in excess of £300m, this company owes its success to its distinctive strategy.

Key to the way this company works is its approach to quality and safety:

• Stringent quality procedures are in place across the company and are backed by a comprehensive quality management system.
• Safety procedures are measured against internationally accepted standards and are continually assessed and improved. One vital area of rail safety involves maintenance work which includes track, signalling, telecommunications and the electrical power supply on commuter, inter-city and international passenger and freight routes.

Partnership with OCC has enabled this railway contractor to take safety one step further through the incorporation of data analysis systems within rail switch points.

Maintenance of rail track points would be improved by a condition monitoring system which would help to predict a "points failure" situation, thus reducing delays to trains.

Sensor equipment installed at the points will monitor and record a variety of variables - such as the temperature of the machinery, the condition of the track and the position and timing of the shift - each time the point performs a switch between different tracks.

This data is then collected and transported back to the central railway offices via a GSM datalink. Software written by OCC then undertakes a stringent analysis of the information, generating graphs and alarms to aid in the prediction of "points failure" situations.