Toronto Transit Commission Gains Critical Control With Massive Rear Projection Cube Videowall Installation By Advanced!

The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) selected Advanced to upgrade their Control Room where they monitor Toronto’s four subway lines, 11 streetcar routes, and more than 140 bus routes each day.

The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), home to one of the largest Control Rooms in North America, wanted to incorporate the most dependable and innovative videowall display for monitoring Toronto’s public transportation system. To do so, they turned to Advanced, Canada’s leading AV integrator, to envision and install a large 80” Delta Displays Rear Projection LED Cube videowall system that guarantees 24/7 footage of the city’s transportation system for more than 1.6 million people daily.

“Advanced is honored to have been selected from a pool of elite Canadian integrators for this critical project,” Advanced Co-President David Weatherhead said today. “The TTC’s Control Room oversees the safety of 460 million passengers annually. Utilizing dependable technology is essential in order to make sure everything runs smoothly.”

When selecting the ideal videowall for the TTC’s Control Room, Advanced knew it had to be dependable, low-maintenance, and easily serviceable. The Delta 80” Rear Projection LED cube videowall embodies all of these factors; broken into different sections, each low-maintenance rear projection cube displays four separate camera feeds. Other cubes display the transit system and subway lines status allowing control room operators to make critical decisions.  Each cube operates independently, so that if one has an issue, the rest of the videowall remains functional.  The LED light source ensures no lamps need to be replaced over the life of the display, and since Delta is the world’s largest manufacturer of power supplies the power engine is extremely robust and durable.

“Most importantly, the videowall is easily field serviceable, as it provides rear access to the displays without affecting the image presented at the front. Therefore, we can change or repair a cube without affecting the rest of the videowall, which is extremely important in this type of operation,” Advanced Vice President Mark McPherson said today.

Switching out the TTC Control Room’s fifteen-year-old system presented several challenges for Advanced. Firstly, the videowall had to be updated in sections and matched precisely to the concave curvature of the wall, which required custom-tailored engineering. Secondly, the Delta LED rear projection cubes are smaller than the previous systems’, so each new cube had to be custom matched with two sections flanking each side.

In order to install a videowall in a 24/7 mission-critical room, Advanced provided a temporary seamless NEC LCD ultra-narrow bezel videowall during the installation process so that TTC employees could continue to monitor Toronto’s public transport system at any given time.

In addition, Advanced technicians worked through the night to avoid busy transit times, such as Toronto’s rush hour. “Our integration staff was fully briefed on the TTC Control Room’s schedule and unique requirements. All of this work was done in the wee hours of the morning,” McPherson added.

The Transit Control room oversees every vital Toronto Transit System operation. As the largest referrer to 911, Transit Control workers are responsible for maintaining order in an emergency. The room holds 98 employees, 22 per shift, working 24/7 to track the trains.