The new doors which could save lives

Schaltbau Transportation UK open doors for safer, more reliable trains

The term ‘trap and drag’ whilst quite rare is one of great concern to the rail industry.

It refers to events when someone is caught in the doors of a train and dragged along the platform as it departs. It has unfortunately led to fatalities.

Schaltbau Transportation UK is hoping to change that when it looks to put a new system on trial on UK vehicles.

There’s a big issue at the moment in the UK about trap and drag. People try and cram in at the last minute, the doors are audibly making a noise saying they are closing and people are chancing it. There’s been instances where the doors have actually closed, they’ve trapped them, but the vehicle thinks the doors are fully closed, it can release its brakes and it can move on.

Well of course a body part is hanging out on the external side of the train – it goes into a bridge there have been fatalities and it’s not good. So what is very important is detecting that passenger. Bode our group company, the door system specialists, have come up with a boarding management unit which is all seeing all encompassing.

It is a camera, or a sensor and it provides an apron down at the doorway on the inside and the outside, it removes all push buttons, it removes all sensitive edge detection obstacles so it doesn’t need any of that. It can detect if someone is in the vicinity of the door and it won’t close the doors on you. It won’t allow the train to move on so it gets around this track and drag.

In the future it could be quite unique because it can do face recognition – it can say if someone has gone on with a bag but has come off without a bag. Maybe someone has left a package. It can also be used for ticketing.

It’s that big brother on the vehicle making sure that automatically it’s safe to operate, people are safe to use the train. We’re hoping to get traction on it. It falls into our innovation and our unique selling point.

The boarding management unit is a fantastic design. On a train you don’t want too much equipment – the more equipment you’ve got to do something, the more chance it’s going to go wrong and cause you a problem. So if you need passenger push buttons you have all the wiring that’s associated and all the little bits that makes one passenger push button up. Same with the sensor with a little door seal that detects if something is pushed on it to open the door – think of all the electronics associated with that.

If you don’t need that then great and you can manage it by one system and you can provide all this functionality where it counts passengers going on and counts passengers off, it can recognise people, baggage, ticketing, that’s a real science.