A ground-breaking Ulverston firm is providing innovative lights to help keep the London Underground moving and save energy costs.
Marl International has started to deliver energy-saving lighting for the Bakerloo line trains operated by Transport for London. The line’s lighting will be upgraded completely by 2024.
Experts at Marl have designed manufactured and installed a complete retrofit LED lighting system for the 36-strong fleet – which means a million new lights for 252 carriages.
Adrian Rawlinson, managing director of Marl International, said: “We are proud to have delivered a major upgrade on time and on budget. London’s Underground network is an exceptionally demanding environment, and the LED lighting systems supplied by Marl met and exceeded the operating expectations of Transport for London.”
The development phase started with a large and rigorous set of rail performance and safety design standards and 4,000 pages of standards formed the basis of Marl International’s verification and validation design matrix.
The requirement to deliver reliability led to the creation of an energy storage system, allowing all the train’s interior lighting to run without power for more than three seconds, across track gaps where no power is provided to the train.
Swapping the dated fluorescent tubes to the new LED lighting system achieved a 50 per cent energy saving, as well as securing savings in energy and maintenance costs, Marl said.
The fleet’s 4,906 lighting units, including 512 power supply units, a million LEDs and more than three million components were designed and manufactured at Marl International’s Ulverston site.
