Hi Gerard, 

If it's just for interest and to see what it covers you can read the 2007 edition here:

https://www.scribd.com/document/115330052/Manual-of-Good-Practice

I believe you can get free read access to scribd for 30 days.

If it's actually for a delivery project to LU you'd probably need to ask them for the 2016 edition (afaik that's the latest).

I am delighted to say that I don't have a copy as thankfully it's been several years since I last had to make an LU EMC case!

Hope that helps a bit,

Andy

Thanks Andy.

It very much a look to see what the EMC regime is and how to meet it.  Is it worth bringing products into this space and the implications?  Compatibility with current certification of equipment and any LU delta. So not a supplier relationship but interest in knowing the regime that operates. 

It is a very challenging environment. Now, the last LU EMC case I wrote was in 2015, however the technical environment won't have changed much (but I can't comment on the present acceptance environment). I've worked on rail product acceptance cases for authorities all over the world, and I sit on one of the Rail Safety and Standards Board  EMC committees, but I have probably spent as much time on LU EMC cases as all the rest of them added together! Just because reaching agreement is sooo complicated.

The trouble is that it is a spectacularly noisy environment, with much of the infrastructure in an "interesting" condition - no reflection on the staff involved, it's just the age and complexity of the system. 4th rail dc traction, steel tunnel tubes, and a whole range of historic signalling, scada and telecoms systems mean that it's incredibly hard to even specify EMC requirements, let alone demonstrate that they have been met. Realistically everything has to be done on a case by case basis. (There was a discussion on here recently about "clean earths" - well LU earths can be just weird, even audio frequency signals can disappear down an "earth" and just reappear 100s of metres away.)

So regarding compatibility with current certification, particularly the relevant one being EN50121, unfortunately much of the environment in LU is so much worse than the test limits of EN50121 that compliance to the standard doesn't help much. When we drafted 50121 it was not in the expectation that equipment tested to it would work in that specific environment - if we'd done that then equipment would have been massively over specified (i.e. massively over expensive) for more typical rail environments.

As I say, I can't comment on what the acceptance regime is today, but it certainly always used to be that for any new product application more-or-less bespoke EMC requirements would be placed on the product supplier by LU, dependent on the particular application on the particular line. The product supplier (the side I was on) would go back with a cost for modifying their product to achieve these, LU would say this was too expensive, and so the fun would begin...this could take literally years to reach agreement. But there was a good reason behind it.

I don't do a lot of EMC work these days, but I do still generally enjoy working on Network Rail EMC cases. However I never enjoyed working on LU EMC cases, on the technical side it was so difficult to really feel confident that all the risks had been identified and managed.

Not that I'd want to put anyone off!

Thanks,

Andy