Sound Transit

Design and Development of a Wireless Mesh Network for Sound Transit Commuter Rail Trains

Sound Transit's current heavy rail commuter trains use carriages that are shuffled regularly to form a consist, but do not have a network to allow for consist-wide communication for the various systems that exist on each carriage. As a result, tracking and finding information about entire consists is very difficult to do efficiently. The student team worked to create a prototype of a consist-wide network for these preexisting systems to communicate through, while also allowing carriages to be rearranged and moved to different consists while automatically joining the network of their new consists with no human input.