Live gas monitoring
across a live rail network

Crowcon’s gas detectors were doing their job — but the information they generated wasn’t easy to get to. The units reported into SCADA only when an alarm threshold was breached, so there was no ongoing visibility of actual gas levels, trends, or system health.

Getting a current reading meant sending an engineer to a remote, restricted-access location to record it by hand — a slow, costly process that also put personnel into hazardous environments more often than the job strictly required.

dbr designed and installed a monitoring layer that reads directly from the Crowcon Gasmaster control units, without ever writing back to them.

BusByte connects to the Gasmaster unit and extracts gas concentration, alarm status, and system health data using a strict read-only method — it is physically and logically incapable of sending write or configuration commands back to the detector. That data then passes over a hardware-enforced, transmit-only link with no receive channel at all.

An Olympus module encrypts the data and transmits it to dbr’s cloud infrastructure, where it’s processed into live readings, historical trend graphs, and a digital replica of the on-site Gasmaster display — available to authorised users on any web-enabled device.

The read-only constraint isn’t a setting; it’s built into the hardware. Even in a worst-case scenario where the cloud infrastructure was compromised, the gas detection equipment itself would remain fully isolated — the same guarantee that allowed this architecture onto live, safety-critical equipment across the DLR network.

The Gasmaster units and the Xgard detectors behind them are certified safety equipment on a live, staffed rail network — not a data source that can afford to be wrong. A conventional two-way monitoring link would have given a cloud outage, a credential leak, or a compromised dashboard a path back to that equipment: a false reading pushed to the unit, an alarm silenced, a configuration changed on equipment nobody was standing in front of. On safety-critical infrastructure, that’s not a data risk. It’s a passenger safety risk.

dbr’s link to the Gasmaster units carries no return path at all — not a locked-down one, not a heavily audited one. There is no credential to leak, no port to close, no command channel to secure, because none of them were built. If dbr’s cloud infrastructure were compromised outright, there would still be nothing on the other end for an attacker to reach: the detectors would keep alarming exactly as Crowcon and KeolisAmey Docklands certified them to, untouched by anything happening downstream.

Full, continuous visibility of gas concentration, alarm status, and system health across the DLR network — not just alarm events

Trends visible long before they approach an alarm threshold, enabling proactive rather than reactive maintenance

Far fewer manual site visits, reducing cost and cutting personnel exposure to hazardous or confined spaces

A continuous, timestamped record suitable for safety and compliance reporting

Zero compromise to the integrity of the certified Crowcon safety system underneath

A single-detector pilot live on the dashboard within 48 hours, with no changes to existing Xgard or Gasmaster hardware and no new cabling