Case Studies - Transportation

All change at - Paddington – Liverpool Street – Baker Street

From VHS to Tecton Darlex Digital Video Recorders

Secure Vision has recently completed a video recording upgrade project at four London Underground stations for Metronet Rail. We have replaced VHS time lapse video recorders and multiplexers with the Tecton Darlex Digital Video Recorder (DVR).

The following equipment was installed:
Baker Street -
5 Tecton Darlex DVR's to accommodate 82 cameras
Liverpool Street –
5 Tecton Darlex DVR's to accommodate 77 cameras
Moorgate –
3 Tecton Darlex DVR's to accommodate 50 cameras
Paddington –
3 Tecton Darlex DVR's to accommodate 40 cameras

The key element to this project was the intricate changeover plan from old to new, so as to minimise the interruption of recordings. As the engineering hours are minimal, we effectively had 4 hours during the night to accomplish each task.

At Liverpool Street the planning was not quite as difficult as we installed a new rack in the communications equipment room (CER) which was then populated with the DVR's.

The rack had been populated with all of the equipment and the cable looming had been previously carried out in our workshop where a factory acceptance test had been carried out with the client.

The existing VCR's were located in the station operations room (SOR) with the multiplexers being located in the CER. We looped through by installing temporary video amplifiers in the CER which we terminated to the DVR's. Both recording systems ran simultaneously for a short period when finally we decommissioned the multiplexers and VCR's.

With the three remaining stations, the existing racks had to be reused and therefore we had to preprogram the DVR's and carryout changeovers by removing the multiplexers and VCR's and installing the DVR's, ensuring that all video down time was kept to the absolute minimum.

Each station has a control room and all of the Tecton Darlex units are integrated into the existing matrix's, the live video images are viewed by London Underground staff. Each station also has a British Transport Police review suite and this is used to view live and recorded images. This is achieved using a network switch which we also designed and installed.

The project was delivered on time and within budget.