Improvement of the OCS in the information age

After the opening of the Lantau and airport railway (LAR) in 1998, the dynamic performance of the overhead conductor system (OCS) was considered needing improvement. There were scintillation, broken droppers and excessive worn-out of contact wire and high consumption of pantograph collector strips. The maintainers had limited number of suitable measuring devices and analytical tools at their disposal to collect the engineering data, to study the dynamic performance, to evaluate the system performance and to launch improvement initiatives. This paper drawing the experience in the past ten years in studying and improving the OCS of a metro system, describes the onerous journey using the then available information technology to help justify several improvement projects. These projects were completed to enhance the asset life of contact wire and set back the imminent needs of asset replacement by many years. The preferred information and data, the capabilities and constraints of measuring devices and the techniques for data processing are also outlined in this paper.