Since 1996 a model railway installation exists at the Department of Computer Science. At the moment it is maintained by the work group of Realtime Systems/Embedded Systems and is employed in practical laboratory courses and practical course exercises. It is named after the Kicking Horse Pass in Canada, which was the example for its track layout. After several rebuildings the installation has a size of 18 square meters and comprises tracks with a length of about 127 meters where more then 8 trains can be operated concurrently.

The Model Railway Installation

The track layout is separated into 48 blocks, which have a length of between 51 and 459 cm. Additionally there are 80 sensor contacts, 28 switch points with 30 actuators, 58 semaphore signals and one railroad crossing with two bars and a bell. All together there are 245 sensors and actuators that are controlled by custom made electronic circuit boards. These are connected to 24 PC104-Computers and 8 TTP Powernodes (Time-Triggered Protocol). Communication between the computers is done either with Ethernet, TTP or two distinct CAN-Buses, which makes them reachable for the control software. The electronic power is supplied by three 12V DC power supplies with 30A capacity. The typical power consumption of the whole installation in full operation is at about 300 Watts.

The software developer is free to choose the kind of network he or she likes to employ. Hence next to typical Master/Slave-Architectures there are also distributed architectures realizable. The design can be done either manually in C/C++ or model-based with different tools, such as Matlab/Simulink or SCADE.

• Demo feature video, ~10min
  • 30MB x264 avi: with explanatory subtitles, without subtitles
  • 177MB mpeg2: with explanatory subtitles, without subtitles
• Introduction to modeling by  Esterel Technologies (with railway intro), shown at  Innotrans 2008, ~8min
  • 67MB DivX avi: download

Find further information here:

• Model Railway Project 2007: This project developed a full featured controller for the model-railway with model-based design. It employed the time-triggere protocol network to build a distributed controller using the modeling language SCADE of Esterel-Technologies.
• Model Railway Base Website: (german only) Original model railway website created by Stephan Höhrmann with lots of information about the railway itself, all details about the custom electronics (e.g. circuit diagrams), networks, communication protocols, photos, etc.