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Researchers have come up with a sophisticated system to trigger warning signals at unmanned railroad crossings, where collisions between trains and passenger vehicles have been blamed on carelessness and the absence of crossing guards.

Of the estimated 8,000 railroad crossings across the country, around 70 percent are unmonitored, says Taufik Hidayat, from Indonesia Railway Watch.

To prevent accidents at these crossings, researchers from the Calibration, Instrumentation and Metrology Research Center at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) have developed a wireless warning system to alert pedestrians and motorists about oncoming trains.

Dedi Pendi, the team’s instrumentation expert and software developer, says the system consists of two devices: a remote terminal and a master console. The remote unit is installed in the train and operated by the train’s engineer, while the master unit is installed in designated centralized stations.

The remote unit, equipped with a global positioning system, sends a wireless signal to the master unit when the train passes an assigned coordinate heading in the direction of an unmanned crossing, Dedi explains.

“The master unit transmits the signal to the field instrument we install at the crossing, which in turn sets off signals to warn pedestrians and motorists,” he says, adding the entire process is wireless.

The researchers believe the system will be particularly well-suited for crossings where there are no guards or electricity, because the field instruments will be powered by solar panels, with a backup battery for operation at night or in cloudy weather.

Programmers key into the remote and master terminal units the GPS coordinates of points before the unmanned crossings. When a train passes through this point, the pre-programmed remote unit sends a signal to the master unit, which in turn transmits another signal to the signaling system at the crossing.

Dedi says there is no specific distance from the crossings at which to pick these pre-programmed points, pointing out it also depends on the train’s speed.

The team also included a manual override in case the remote unit fails to beam its signal to the master unit. In this manual mode, the train operator is alerted of the upcoming crossing, and can then use a separate remote unit to activate the alert at the crossing.

Chief researcher Daryono Restu Wahyono says that the team developed the system over a period of four years and presented it last year to state-run railway operator PT Kereta Api.

Despite the company’s interest, Daryono says the system will not be implemented anytime soon. “There’s a lengthy bureaucratic process that we have to go through,” he says, adding that the team has developed a prototype that has proven effective in several trial runs, although it has never been tested on an actual railway route.

Even as technology continues to advance, IRW’s Taufik says unmanned railway crossings will always be a hot spot for accidents simply because many motorists and pedestrians choose to cross despite warning signals.

“They cross because they think the train is still far away, unaware that it’s hurtling toward them at high speed and could very well plow through them in a matter of seconds,” he says.

Meanwhile, Daryono says the LIPI team has also developed a maintenance system that can detect misalignments in railways based on vibrations from the trains going over distended tracks. The system works by comparing a pre-programmed standard vibrations with vibrations from faulty tracks.

The LIPI research was financed with a Rp 180 million ($19,800) incentive fund from the State Ministry for Research and Technology. In 2009, the team also received Rp 150 million from the Ministry of National Education’s Directorate General of Higher Education, which also provided Rp 100 million this year.