Automatic Railway Gate Controller

Automatic Railway Gate Control System is a simple but very useful project, which help is automatically opening and closing the railway gate upon detecting arrival or departure of the train.

In general, Railway gates are opened or closed manually by a gate keeper. The information about arrival of train for opening or closing of door is received from nearby station. But some railway crossings are totally unmanned and many railway accidents occur at these unmanned level crossings.

To avoid the human intervention at level crossings completely, we need to automate the process of railway gate control.

Principle of Operation

The principle of operation behind the working of this project lies in the functioning of IR Sensor. A Reflective type IR Sensor is used in this project.

In Reflective Type IR Sensor, the IR transmitter and receiver are placed side by side. When there is no obstacle in front of the sensor, the IR rays transmitted by the IR Transmitter will travel undetected as there are no rays falling on the IR Receiver.

If there is an obstacle in front of the IR Transmitter and Receiver pair, the IR Rays gets reflected off from the surface of the obstacle and are incident on the IR Receiver.

This setup can be configured to detect an object like a Train and in turn can be used to switch ON or OFF the loads like motors with the help of microcontroller.