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Automatic Railway System

Article  in  International Journal of Computer Applications · February 2017

DOI: 10.5120/ijca2017913018

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 159 – No 8, February 2017

Automatic Railway System

Leena G., PhD Chetan Singh Vidawat Nitesh Jha
Dept. of EEE, MRIU Dept. of EEE, MRIU Dept. of EEE, MRIU
Faridabad, Haryana, India Faridabad, Haryana, India Faridabad, Haryana, India

ABSTRACT highlighted by different committees; the National Transport

The aim of this paper is to automate various operations related Policy Committee, the Rail Tariff Enquiry Committee and the
to opening and closing of railway gates in order to minimize Railway Reforms Committee. The competition with road
the accidents at unmanned railway gates. This automatic transport is growing in intensity, both in passenger and in
system also identifies the person who is unnecessarily pulling goods transport. The lack of coordination between railways
the chains and alerts the station master about the position of and road transport has lowered the earning capacity of the
train using GSM technique. It also identifies unwanted railways. This has further caused delay in traffic movement
obstruction in the track by anti-collision technique and detects and inconvenience to passengers.
the breakage in track. This automatic railway system reduces It is reported in daily newspapers that many rail accidents
the waiting time of road passengers at the railway crossings occur at unmanned railway crossings. This is mainly due to
since it will identify the arrival of the train and there by the carelessness in manual operations or lack of workers,
closing the gate when needed. unnecessary pulling of chain and long waiting at the railway
crossing.
Keywords
GSM technique, Railway joint track detection, Anti-collision Indian Railway has developed a vandal-proof warning system
technique, RFID technique, Chain- pulling system for unmanned level crossings which is working satisfactorily
for the last three months on Coimbatore-Mettupalayam
1. INTRODUCTION section [1]. In Indian railways, there are a total of 28,607 level
Railways being one of the safest and cheapest modes of crossings across the country of which 19,267 are manned and
transportation are preferred over all the other means of 9340 are unmanned. According to the action plan, the
transport. So, it is essential to maintain and improve the railways is focusing on eliminating almost all the unmanned
current level of safety. A safe railway is more efficient and level crossing in the next 3-4 years [2].With this focus it is
also a more attractive transport choice, enabling society to desirable to study various techniques to control the operation
address the environmental and economic challenges of the of gates at level crossings. Many journal papers are available
21st century. Railway safety is a crucial aspect of rail which proposes automated railway gate system [3-7]. These
operation the world over. There are regular newspaper reports papers discuss different options such as automatically
about railway accidents occurring at different railway level controlled railway gate at the level crossing, railway track
crossings and many people lost their lives in such accidents. switching mechanism and the movement of the train using
sensors, micro controllers for reduction of railway accidents
Although the development of railways took place rapidly, still and controller for stepper motor which operates the opening
there are enormous problems in the path of its steady growth. and closing of railway gates at the railway crossings.
The major problem faced by Indian railways is that the tracks
are old and obsolete. These old tracks cause many serious K Vidyasagar et al [8] designed a system which uses
railway accidents. This has also resulted in speed restrictions. ultrasonic sensors to identify objects on the track and
Virtually, in every new timetable, running time of all trains accordingly control signal is generated and transferred to the
has been increased while railways in other advanced countries control room via communication protocol to control the
are reducing it drastically Another problem that is being faced movement of train in railway track. Pwint et al [9] describes
in India is that a large number of passengers travel without the automatic railway gate control system using PIC
purchasing tickets. The incidence of railway accidents in India microcontroller for saving precious human lives and
is greater as compared to other countries of the world. preventing major disasters in railway track. An Arduino based
Accidents also occur due to the errors and negligence of the control system for the opening and closing of railway gates
employees. with IR sensors for detection of train is proposed by
Krishnamurthi et al [10]. A detailed introduction about the
There is a lack of modern management as railways failed to technology adopted in railways is described with the
provide adequate incentives to attract suitable talent. In disadvantages of manually operated railway warning systems
addition to it, it could not make economic analysis for at level crossings by Dewangan et al [11]. Mahmud et al [12]
perspective planning tariff. The rolling stock technology is discuss the design and implementation of an automated
absolutely outmoded. The system is beset with excessive staff railway gate control system which detects the train by
and manpower development has not kept pace with analyzing the reflected waves, produces alarm, controls light
technology up gradation. This has made railways incapable of signal and gate.
coping with increased transport demand and of raising and
improving the traffic volume and flows at lower unit cost of
operation.
Most of the railway lines are single lines which create great
inconvenience to the railway organization and passengers.
The railway transport has lagged behind the requirement due
to inadequate investment. The shortcoming has been

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 159 – No 8, February 2017

In the present paper it is tried to automate all the necessary other words, there is a tradeoff between how much torque a
operations in railways i.e. controlling of gates, identifying the motor delivers, and how fast the output shaft spins.
person who is unnecessarily pulling the emergency chain,
alerting the station master about the location of train, 2.4 Power Supply
identification of crack in railway track and anti-collision The power supply setup for the project consists of a step
technique. down transformer to decrease the level of voltage and current
and rectifier circuit, filter and voltage regulator is used to
In order to reduce accidents in unmanned railway crossings it convert ac to dc of 12V/5V
is proposed to have an automatic gate control system at the
crossings. The arrival of the train at the crossing in terms of 2.5 Voltage Regulator
distance is calculated and informed to the staff of railways Regulated power supply is an electronic circuit that is
through GSM which enables lesser closing times of the designed to provide a constant dc voltage of predetermined
railway gates for the road transport users. In addition to this, value across load terminals irrespective of ac mains
the fault in railway track as well as a message is carried to the fluctuations or load variations. The two main parts of a
station master when there is another train on the same track.. regulated power supply are a simple power supply and a
voltage regulating device. The power supply output is given
2. HARD WARE IMPLEMENTATION as input to the voltage regulating device that provides the final
The system developed has the following features: output.
Distance measuring between arriving train and crossing
platform in kilometers using magnetic reader which are placed 2.6 Relay
after few kilometer from one another , Notifying station Relay is an electrically switching device based on the
master about status of arriving train using GSM technique so principle of electromagnetism. It consists of an electromagnet
that prior information can be given for that gate opening and made from iron wound with hundreds of fine copper wire.
closing so as to cause less inconvenience to the public, When electricity is supplied to the wire, the rod becomes
Automatic railway gate operation at the crossing (unmanned), magnetic. A movable contact arm above the rod is then pulled
RFID technique used for emergency stopping instead of toward the rod until it closes a switch contact. When the
chain-pulling system so that unnecessarily chain pulling can electricity is switched off, a small spring pulls the contact arm
be avoided. Using this a record of the person who is pulling away from the rod until it closes a second switch contact. By
the chain is kept in case of emergency. Most of the railway means of relay, a current circuit can be broken or closed in
accident took place because of broken railway track, this one circuit with the change of current in another circuit.
result in loss of property and human which can be identified
by means of sensors .Also an anti-collision module is 2.7 GSM Module
developed to avoid head on collision on railway tracks. A GSM/GPRS module assembles a GSM/GPRS modem with
The main block diagram of the developed automatic railway standard communication interfaces like RS-232 (Serial Port),
system is given in Fig.1. The main components of the overall USB etc., so that it can be easily interfaced with a computer or
system are power supply unit, microcontroller, magnetic a microprocessor / microcontroller based system. The power
reader, relays, IR sensors, RFID module, GSM module and supply circuit is also built in the module that can be activated
anti collision modules by using a suitable adaptor.

2.1 89S52 Microcontroller 2.8 RFID Chain Pulling Module

The AT89S52 is a low-power, high-performance CMOS 8-bit An RFID system consists of two separate components: a tag
microcontroller with 8K bytes of in-system programmable and a reader. Tags are analogous to barcode labels, and come
Flash memory. The device is manufactured using Atmel‟s in different shapes and sizes. The tag contains an antenna
high-density nonvolatile memory technology and is connected to a small microchip containing up to two kilobytes
compatible with the industry standard 80C51 instruction set of data. The reader, or scanner, functions similarly to a
and pin out. The AT89S52 provides the following standard barcode scanner; however, while a barcode scanner uses a
features: 8K bytes of Flash, 256 bytes of RAM, 32 I/O lines, laser beam to scan the barcode, an RFID scanner uses
Watchdog timer, two data pointers, three 16-bit electromagnetic waves.
timer/counters, a six-vector two-level interrupt architecture, a
full duplex serial port, on-chip oscillator, and clock circuitry.
2.9 Anti-Collision Module
IR Sensors work by using a specific light sensor to detect a
2.2 Magnetic Reader select light wavelength in the Infra-Red (IR) spectrum. By
Magnetic reader is the device used for measuring the distance using an LED which produces light at the same wavelength as
by sensing the magnet. Every vehicle has a magnetic field, a what the sensor is looking for, you can look at the intensity of
vehicle‟s magnetic field has an inverse relationship with the received light. When an object is close to the sensor, the
distance at small distances [13]. The relationship provides a light from the LED bounces off the object and into the light
way to estimate a vehicle‟s position using its magnetic field sensor. This results in a large jump in the intensity, which we
when the vehicle is less than a few meters away, which could already know can be detected using a threshold.
be useful for detecting imminent collisions just before they
occur. The sensors will provide information on the relative
2.10 Software Implementation
The software used in the system is Embedded „C‟
velocity and position of the impending crash on the vehicle.
programming with Keil compiler.
2.3 DC Motor
It is effectively design with D.C. motors, it is necessary to 3. DESIGN AND TESTING
understand their characteristic curves. For every motor, there Various features are developed in this system i.e. unmanned
is a specific Torque/Speed curve and Power curve. The torque gate control, track joint detection, GSM technique for
is inversely proportional to the speed of the output shaft. In delivering actual status of train to station master, RFID

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 159 – No 8, February 2017

technique used for chain pulling to identifying the person who technology. It is tried to automate various operations related
pulled the chain and anti-collision technique for safety to opening and closing of railway gates in this paper. Thus
measures, and distance measurement. Initially the power accidents are avoided at places where there is no person
supply was designed for proper voltage and current used for managing the railway crossing gates. The system also
whole circuitry. This power further sends to the different identifies the person who is unnecessarily pulling the chains.
components used in the circuit for designing the automatic It alerts the station master about the location of train using
railway system. For the operation of opening and closing of GSM technique, railway joint track detection, This system
railway gates a dc motor is controlled using 89s52 reduces the waiting time of road passengers at the railway
microcontroller. crossings since it will identify the arrival of the train and there
by closing the gate when needed. The obstacle detection
Magnetic readers are placed at certain distances in the track. system is very helpful to avoid accidents while the train is
When the train crosses this magnetic reader, the distance moving through the forest. It will save the life of wild animals
measured is transmitted to the station master through GSM and also reduce the accidents in track. The present system is a
module which is connected to microcontroller. RFID module proto type model which can be expanded to be operational in
is developed and connected to microcontroller to avoid the actual real time systems. Further identification of unwanted
unnecessary chain pulling. In the proposed automatic railway chain pulling can be done by linking Adhaar card with the
system the chain pulling device is replaced by RFID system. RFID technique.
The passengers use the identified cards to pull the chain by
which the identity of the passengers is known and hence
unwanted chain pulling is reduced. An anti-collision module
is developed using IR sensor placed on the train. It will
identify the objects in front of the train and correspondingly
the train is stopped. The automatic railway system proposed
with the above features was successfully tested on a prototype
model developed and shown in Fig.2

4. CONCLUSIONS
It is a challenge to save the human life and vehicles from
miserable train accidents in the era of modern science and

RFID module Train stops

module
Magnetic
Distance measured
sensors
Power Microco
supply ntroller GSM Distance sent to
module station master

Gate control Gate ON/OFF

IR sensor Train starts/stops

Fig 1: Block diagram of automatic railway system

Fig. 2 Developed model of the automatic railway system

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 159 – No 8, February 2017

5. REFERENCES Journal of Science, Engineering and Technology

[1] Railways to eliminate over 6,000 unmanned Research (IJSETR), Volume 4, Issue 4,April 2015 ,pp
level crossings, article in the Indian Express, 30th July 1062-1066.
2016 by PTI. [8] K. Vidyasagar, P. SekharBabu, R. RamPrasad,Anti
[2] Indian Railway develops warning system for unmanned Collision and Secured Level Crossing System,
level crossings, article in Times of India, 25th October International Journal of Computer Applications Volume
2015 by PTI 107 ,No 3, December 2014, pp.1-4.

[3] J. Banuchandar, V. Kaliraj, P. Balasubramanian, S. Deepa, [9] HninNgwe Yee Pwint, ZawMyoTun, HlaMyoTun,
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Crossing System”, International Journal of Modern Microcontroller, International Journal of Science,
Engineering Research (IJMER)Volume.2, Issue.1, Jan- Engineering and Technology Research (IJSETR),
Feb 2012, pp-458-463. Volume 3, Issue 5, May 2014 ,pp 1547-1551

[4] Ahmed Salih Mahdi. Al-Zuhairi,“Automatic Railway Gate [10] Karthik Krishnamurthi, Monica Bobby, Vidya V, Edwin
and Crossing Control based Sensors & Microcontroller ”, Baby,Sensor based automatic control of railway
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Technology (IJCTT) – Volume 4 Issue 7–July 2013, Computer Engineering and Technology, vol.4,issue 2
pp.2135-2140. Feb2015, pp.539-543

[5]Krishna, Shashi Yadav and Nidhi, “Automatic Railway [11] Atul Kumar Dewangan, Meenu Gupta, Pratibha Patel,
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