On the 14th Of December 2006, 1 day before its 100th Birthday, Finsbury Park Interchange was officially opened by the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone. In the first time in the stations history, it was finally finished!!

Working for London Buses, through the main contractor Fitzpatrick, we have spent the last 18 months installing the PA system and Comms Infrastructure, which is now complete. It features the latest versions of all previous technologies we have developed to work for the Buses, along with the all new application of fibre-optic as the system data infrastructure.

The site is cut in half by 10 lines of Overground rail services, with seperate bus stations either side. Each site has its own PA system, both having two 42U racks full of equipment, which are linked together, and controlled from the Application Solutions (ASL) VAR20 DSP Router, located in the main office, in Station Place (SP).

2 of over 30 speakers used in the Public Areas at Station Place

Given the potential electrical interference, and length of communications between the two sites, Fibre Optic comms made very practical sense. The backbone we provided, which we shared use of with the CCTV contractor, offers 36 cores of data streams between sites.

A further speaker, this using a custom made mount, which the steel fabricators provided for us, to our specification.

It was the first time ASL had used fibre optic instead of copper to link remote racks in this way, but after only 6 weeks of co-operative development work and testing, and a crate or two of Red Bull, all niggles were removed and the system was passed fit to install.

A close up of one of the many termination points in each rack

The job was complicated by having to do the installation in distinct phases, in order to minimise disruption to the 80,000 people who pass through this station daily.

The first phase was the Well's Terrace (WT) half, and initially all 4 racks were based in the WT electrical room, with the fibre link bridging the few metres between them. The SP racks were given fake loads on the amplifier outputs, whilst the WT system was plumbed into the finished Bus Stands and Speakers on CCTV columns, as they were completed.

A view of the rear of the main rack

Similar to our speakers at Victoria, we once again used Penton to develop a unique, stainless steel, vandal resistant speaker to directly mount to the new bus shelters. On the periphary of the site we used conventional Next 2 Horn Speakers, mounted on the CCTV columns.

Wells Terrace features 3 islands, each with its own shelter, and each shelter featuring over 10 speakers, and ambient noise microphones to adjust the local output volume.

WT was fully functioning by March 2006, with the Router and amps tricked into thinking that SP existed, allowing us to test the systems reliability through the Fibre infrastructure. To date this has not caused any glitches at all, so many thanks to ASL for all ther help in getting this vital aspect to work so well!!

Station Place's impressive "Bubble" canopy

On completion of WT, our attentions turned to the logistics of cabling and mounting speakers in SP. Once this was completed,  the fibre from between the racks was removed, and we tempoarily made a copper connection to keep the WT system working from the SP master rack, whilst in the same room. This allowed us to lay the Fibre into its final position along its route.

The SP racks were then moved to there new location in the SP Controllers office, and the Fibre reterminated. This resulted in only 3 days of outage in order to finish this work and restore the system to full operation.

The front of the Master racks in Station Place. Half of the left rack is given over to CCTV, with the remainder being PA system. Over the 4 racks, there is over 1/2 ton of battery backup and UPSs!!

The fully completed and commissioned system was fully functioning for Mayor Ken's visit, on exact budget and on time!!