SECOND GENERATION REMOTE SHUNTING UNIT LOCOMOTIVES

FOR THE 2016 harvesting season, S2 Engineering integrated a number of new second generation remote shunting unit (RSU) systems into the MSF Sugar and Wilmar Sugar Australia cane rail locomotive fleets. This new series needed to satisfy several significant and often competing challenges, including: a) changes in machine safety standards demanding increasingly stringent safety performance verification; b) the need to integrate into newer locomotives already replete with sophisticated PLC logic control systems and electronic engine/transmission systems; and c) preservation of first generation RSU system driver interface and operational efficiencies. This paper explores the design choices that were made to satisfy these constraints, and shows how safety programmable logic controllers (PLCs) provided the key ingredient to satisfy the technical, operational and regulatory challenges, while meeting or exceeding the performance of the original first generation units.