Speaker: Lynne Collis, Halcrow Group

About this event

The Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL), now known as the “High Speed 1” railway, won the award for “Project of the Decade” at the London Transport Awards on 27 February 2008.

It was one of Europe’s largest infrastructure projects, the scope of the civil works including 134 bridges with 12 viaducts (more than four spans), 7,000,000m³ of earthworks, 44km of tunnels (two of which will run under the River Thames) and a new major bridge crossing of the Medway, 1.3km long.

It provides a 108km high speed rail line from London to the English end of the Channel Tunnel. Section 1 of the railway opened in 2003, and section 2 in November 2007. There are three stations on the CTRL itself, the impressive terminus at St Pancras International Station, Stratford, which will be used for the 2012 Olympics, and Ebbsfleet International, plus Ashford which is shared with Network Rail  

The talk will include a general introduction to CTRL, and will then focus on the development of its train control system and the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System for controlling its traction, electrical and mechanical systems, highlighting features of the signalling and electrical systems, and giving some insights into the challenging aspects of the testing and commissioning

Lynne Collis is a Chartered Principal Systems Engineer with the Halcrow Group and a member of the IET. She joined the company in 1997 and has over 25 years experience in control and systems engineering, specialising since 1991 in systems engineering and human factors for railway control systems, including Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for traction control. She worked on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) project from 1997 to 2007.

For the last four years of her work on the CTRL project, Lynne was based in Paris as Interface Manager for the control systems contract, and worked with the contractor developing the SCADA system which controls traction and HV supply and auxiliary systems.

She is now working as Halcrow’s Interface Co-ordination Manager on the Crossrail project in London, which is currently one of the company’s biggest projects in the UK.