19 Core Trackside Control Cable for Railway Signalling & Power

Signal failure isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a network-wide stoppage that burns capital by the minute. When a single severed conductor in a multicore cable triggers a track circuit failure, the cost isn’t measured in cable replacement—it’s measured in SLA penalties, emergency crew deployment, and cascading timetable collapses. The 19-Core Trackside Control Cable removes this single point of fatigue from your wayside infrastructure. Designed for the continuous mechanical stress and electromagnetic hostility of the permanent way, this cable delivers deterministic signal transmission and auxiliary power distribution through a single, armoured assembly. Fewer conduits, fewer terminations, fewer failure modes. This translates to a measurable reduction in metres of trenching per signal location and a direct cut in glanding labour hours.

Conductor Integrity Under Cyclic Loading

[Feature]: 19 stranded plain copper conductors, each conforming to IEC 60228 Class 2.
[Advantage]: The stranding pitch and circularity are tightly controlled during bunching to eliminate points of high resistance under the micro-movements caused by ballast vibration or train-induced ground displacement.
[Benefit]: No intermittent open circuits during revenue service. For a signalling project engineer, this means the axle counter or point machine data packet arrives intact, without the bit errors that trigger ghost occupations and diagnostic hours you cannot bill back.

Composite Screening Against Traction Current Induction

[Feature]: Individual pair/triple or collective aluminium/polyester tape screen plus an overall tinned copper wire braid.
[Advantage]: The laminated tape provides 100% coverage against capacitive coupling from adjacent power lines running in the same troughing. The braid then handles low-frequency magnetic interference from the traction return current leaking into the earth. This combined barrier targets both the 50 Hz hum and the higher-order harmonics generated by IGBT-based traction drives.
[Benefit]: You keep your signal-to-noise ratio above the threshold of safety-critical equipment. No false feed-through voltage on a vital relay coil. No masking of the tuning frequency in jointless track circuits.

Zero-Halogen Sheath for Confined Trackside Environments

[Feature]: LSZH (Low Smoke Zero Halogen) compound for the inner bedding and outer oversheath, compliant with EN 50267-2-1 for acidity and EN 61034-2 for smoke density.
[Advantage]: In a cable chamber fire or smouldering insulation event triggered by a cable trough hydrocarbon spill, this compound emits no corrosive hydrogen chloride gas. Smoke density stays below the transmissometer limits that allow safe evacuation in a tunnel segment or under-platform void.
[Benefit]: Asset protection and life safety in one specification line. You avoid secondary damage to relay racks and processor-based interlocking hardware caused by airborne hydrochloric acid, and you meet the fire engineer’s strict tunnel ventilation performance parameters.

High-Visibility Polyethylene Bedding for Trough Identification

[Feature]: A distinct orange, high-visibility PE (polyethylene) inner bedding layer extruded directly over the screened core assembly. Compound includes UV stabilisers and carbon black dispersion for outdoor weathering.
[Advantage]: In a trackside cable route shared with high-voltage signalling power feeders and telecom fibre, crew can visually identify the control cable at arm’s length before a spade touches the jacket. The layer also acts as a secondary mechanical barrier over the delicate screen during aggressive cable pulling.
[Benefit]: Zero cable strikes during late-stage civil works. Faster fault-finding during a possession: your team isolates the correct cable in seconds, not the 20 minutes it takes to tone-trace a black-jacketed generic power cable. Possession overrun fines are not hypothetical.

Armour That Takes a Pickaxe Without Earthing the Core

[Feature]: Single layer of galvanised steel wire armour (GSWA), applied with a left-hand lay over a separating sheath, terminated with a transparent flooding compound.
[Advantage]: The armour absorbs crushing forces from ballast compaction and rodent attack without deforming the underlying screen. The drain wire stays intact. Because the armour is isolated from the screen by the intermediate sheath, you get a clean earth path that doesn’t introduce noise into the signal reference.
[Benefit]: Your signalling power bonding strategy remains predictable. The 19 cores continue delivering the voltage and data you specified, even after track renewals that compact the shoulder against the troughing route.

Technical Specifications & Dimensions

This table reflects standard build specifications. For project-specific variations in wire gauge, screen configuration, or halogen content, a full datasheet and sample board are available upon qualification.

Industry Applications & Scenario Validation

• Mainline Railway Signalling (Interlocking Feeders)
  The 19-core layout directly maps to the conductor count needed for multiple signal heads, AWS magnets, and point detection circuits in a single Lineside Location Case. This reduces the cable count in each trough route, simplifying the signal structure bonding design.

• Mass Transit Tunnels (Metro/Subway Fire Zones)
  LSZH sheath and low smoke emission characteristics satisfy the strict fire ventilation scenarios in bored tunnels. The cable runs from the up-track cross-passage to the signal equipment room without contributing to toxic gas load during a traction power flashover.

• Tram & Light Rail Street-Level Routes
  High-visibility orange bedding layer prevents accidental strikes by utility crews sharing a congested road corridor. The GS wire armour provides the crush resistance needed under shallow asphalt cover in a street-running environment where heavy goods vehicles routinely cross the embedded tracks.

• Freight Yard & Depot Automation
  For hump yards and automatic coupler zones, the screen attenuation rejects the electromagnetic noise from high-torque DC point motors and diesel-electric locomotive idling nearby. The 19 conductors provide enough spare pairs to retrofit condition monitoring sensors without pulling new cable.

• High-Speed Line HS1/CTRL-Style Ballastless Trackforms
  The precise bending radius and cylinder-like armour roundness allow smooth pulling through pre-cast plinths and embedded F-tubes without kinking the screen. Long drum lengths (1,000 m) reduce the number of mid-route splice pits, which are a known point of water ingress on aerodynamically rated high-speed track.

International Compliance & QA Standards

• ✅ EN 50288-7 – Multi-element metallic cables for analogue and digital communication, instrumentation and control
• ✅ IEC 60332-1-2 – Flame propagation test for a single insulated wire or cable
• ✅ EN 50267-2-1 – Halogen acid gas emission measurement
• ✅ EN 61034-2 – Smoke density measurement on cables burning under defined conditions
• ✅ IEC 60228 – Conductors of insulated cables (Class 2 flexible stranding)
• ✅ CE Marking – Conformity to EU Low Voltage Directive (2014/35/EU) and applicable CPR requirements
• ✅ RoHS 3 (EU 2015/863) – Restriction of Hazardous Substances
• ✅ ISO 9001:2015 – Cable design, extrusion, screening, armouring, and final testing in certified facility
• ✅ Routine Production Test – 100% spark test at 2.5 kV AC on delivery lengths; conductor resistance continuity on every core

Factory acceptance test certificates (compliant with EN 10204 Type 3.1) are supplied as standard with every drum. Third-party witness testing by SGS, TÜV, or Bureau Veritas is available for contract-critical batches.

FAQ

Q: Can you supply a cable with mixed conductor gauges—say 0.75 mm² for signalling and 1.5 mm² for point-machine power—inside the same 19-core bundle?

Yes. The 19 cores are formed through a planetary stranding line that can accept multiple pay-off bobbins with differing wire diameters. We routinely produce hybrid configurations where 14 cores are 0.75 mm² for detection circuits and 5 cores are 1.5 mm² or 2.5 mm² for motor drives. The filler elements are adjusted to maintain a perfectly circular cross-section before the foil screen is applied. This keeps the bending radius uniform. When you issue the RFQ, specify the exact pinout and the current rating per core group. We will run a thermal derating calculation to verify the ampacity under “conduit in air” and “buried duct” conditions and return the calc sheet with the quotation.

Q: What is the maximum continuous pulling tension your 19-core trackside cable can withstand without deforming the screen or stretching the copper conductors?

The limiting factor is the maximum tensile stress on the copper—which we cap at 50 N/mm² of total conductor cross-sectional area for a pulling-grip applied to the armour, with a secondary safety margin to avoid the inner cores taking any load. For a nominal 0.75 mm² × 19 core build, this anticipates a MAXPUB (Maximum Allowable Pulling Tension) of approximately 710 N, applied to the GS wire armour via a correctly sized Chinese finger grip. The strain is transferred to the armour and not the core. We advise you to monitor tension with a recording dynamometer. Exceeding this value risks necking the aluminium tape screen under the grip, which will compromise the transfer impedance at a point you cannot visually inspect. A technical note on pulling practices—including sidewall bearing pressure limits for duct bends—ships with each drum.

Q: We are replacing a legacy signalling cable that runs along a route where both the return current and lightning surge currents can appear on the armour. Does your cable’s armour-to-screen isolation withstand a 5 kV impulse without flashover, and how is the isolation voltage tested in production?

The intermediate PE bedding sheath between the overall tinned copper screen and the galvanised steel wire armour is extruded to a nominal radial thickness that guarantees a dielectric strength exceeding 8 kV DC between the screen and armour. In production, we perform a 100% inline spark test on this separating sheath before the armour is applied—a test station monitors the sheath for pinholes at 6 kV DC. Then, on finished cable samples from each production run, we conduct a 1-minute, 5 kV rms (approximately 7 kV peak) power-frequency voltage test between the braid screen and the armour, in dry conditions. The leakage current during this test is recorded and must remain below the 2 mA threshold. You will receive this trace in the routine test report with each batch. For areas with known lightning incidence, we can also supply a version where the armour is directly bonded to the screen at each end, but this changes the earthing philosophy—let us know your signalling power schematic.

Request Cable Construction Details and Pricing

For a project-specific quotation that includes hybrid core sizing, custom sheath colour, enhanced UV protection, or fixed-length cutting to your signal location IDs, email the route length schedule or cable schedule extract directly. We return a complete technical data pack within one working day UK time: conductor resistance per core, screen transfer impedance, outer dimensions, and drum weight. Built to standard 19-core geometry from an ISO 9001:2015 cable plant. Shipped with continuous-armour-integrity cable drums, factory-tested from the permanent way side of the railway.