24 Supporting early career engineers Young professional gives winning presentation on London Underground Railway Signalling Engineer Lakshan Subenthiran won our Present Around The World (PATW) Global Final in November, impressing a live audience with his presentation skills and insight into the engineering behind London’s underground railway system. Lakshan was one of four finalists in the competition who presented to attendees at our Achievement Awards ceremony at The Brewery, London. His presentation focused on upgrades to the underground’s Northern Line, intended to support a more frequent, reliable service. Technology that transformed the Northern Line The Northern Line, Lakshan explained in his presentation, was upgraded in 2013 to a Transmission Based Train Control (TBTC) system, which transformed it from what passengers referred to as “the misery line” to “one of the most punctual lines”. The technology behind the system is a series of red loop cables, which act as inductive communication links between the trains on the line and the central control centre. “All the trains running on the Northern Line network are continuously passing information to the centralised control centre on their speed and location,” Lakshan said. “The central control centre will then gather all this information from every single train and will continuously pass back instructions to every single train on the speed that they need to travel at and the distance they need to travel to.” With this information, trains can safely travel closer together – which meant that, after the upgrade, the frequency of train services on the Northern Line could increase. Lakshan noted that it is possible to increase the frequency of services further, but engineers must first tackle some challenges. “The TBTC system is being held back by the old Northern Line infrastructure,” he said. He gave Morden depot with its two-depot control system as an example. If train frequency were to increase, he said, “Our depot controller would need to conduct quite a lot of activities in order to get all the trains out in time and sadly they wouldn’t be able to with the two systems in place. A simple solution would be to replace the two systems with just the one depot control system.” Becoming a “well rounded engineer” Announced the winner of the 2017/18 PATW competition, Lakshan shared what had inspired him to participate. “When I left university and started my career as an engineer, it became very apparent very early on that a well rounded engineer, a good engineer, needs to have strong communication skills,” he said. “They’re skills that are often undermined by people, including engineers. I really wanted to flip that on its head. And I thought the best way to do that was to step out of my comfort zone and to just go big. You can’t really go any bigger than the IET.” Lakshan, representing the UK, received a £1,000 prize and Rahil Mansuri, representing South Asia, came runner up, receiving a £500 prize. Other finalists were Mohamed Abdelazez (Americas), Mohammed Fauzaan Shaikh (EMEA) and Christopher Tan Aik Wei (Asia Pacific). If you’re a student or young professional who would like to develop stronger communication skills, share your technical insights and meet other engineers, take part in this season’s PATW. Find out more at theiet.org/mn-patw Lakshan Subenthiran MIET, Railway Signalling Engineer for Transport for London, at The Brewery, London Member News March 2019