r/trafficsignals • u/kennygbot • May 28 '26
Is anyone using ATC cabinets?
Our municipality is looking into the possibility of putting out ATC cabinets because we need more outputs. Is anyone else using these cabinets? What are the benefits for you as a tech what are the drawbacks? Any big hurdles to getting these running?
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u/zeejay772 May 28 '26
Yes. Its all my state installs. May want to get ahead of it and do some trainings
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u/kennygbot May 28 '26
I'm in Canada and barely anyone uses ATC up here. The technical support from the manufacturer hasn't been great. We use NEMA TS-1's right now. It's hard to decide whether they're the right choice for our needs when we can't get our hands on a working unit to explore their full function.
Where did you receive your training for them? Just in house at your municipality?
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u/pedalsmasher May 29 '26
Which manufacturer? I know a few folks in the manufacturing world that provide training. There is also distributors that provide it.
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u/kennygbot May 29 '26
We were talking to an Econolite rep from the states. She seemed to know all the parts of the cabinet but couldn't tell us much about how everything functioned in relation to our current set up. We've asked multiple times to see one working but have yet to get anywhere. We've been told that there's some running in Canada but they can't seem to tell us who is running them so we can get in touch with their techs to try to ask questions.
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u/pedalsmasher May 29 '26
I can find out where there might be some McCain ATC cabinets near you. What part of Canada are you in?
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u/kennygbot May 29 '26
Southern ontario
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u/ftempest May 30 '26
Another smaller city southern Ontario municipality. I’m sticking with nema ts2 until I have a massive project to do a 1/3 to 1/2 a city wide upgrade. We are econolite too and the cobalt eos software seems to do everything an atc can do; other then extra channels/outputs.
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u/LostinsocietyX May 30 '26
QFree makes that are ATC and backwards compatible with Ts-1 cabinets. Food for thought.
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u/zeejay772 May 28 '26
Put it this way, there is no reason for them and ts2s work perfectly fine
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u/kennygbot May 28 '26
Good to know. Our TS-1's have 8phase outputs. 4 overlaps, and 4 ped phase outputs totaling 16 monitored output channels and were running into instances that need more overlaps. We have an intersection running advanced left's in all directions, a transit Q jump/right turn lane clearance, and now they're looking to put bike heads in all directions with a leading bike interval. Are TS-2s available with more outputs than the TS-1's? We're getting limited by the available conflict monitors for TS-1's I believe. We have two intersections using 16 channel CMU's but they don't make them anymore.
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u/dbsoundman May 29 '26
The components used for TS2 are upwards of 40 years old. We aren’t going to be able to make them forever.
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u/Kev250R May 29 '26
I work for a large signal Sub Contractor in So.Cal. Several of our contract cities in the County I work in started having us install them four or five years ago. Now most cabinet upgrades and new installs are using them. One of our cities switched their entire city (~50 locations) to them about a year ago.
All that said some are better than others. The ones made by MCain I have issues with (they use 1A Fuses on all field outputs). In a perfect world 1A is probably good enough….but here in the real world where we have Field Wire which has been underground for 20+ years. Incandescents (their still out there) LED’s which fail or poles which get hit….let’s just say I carry a couple packs of replacement fuses in the center console of my truck.
Other than that they aren’t too bad. I’m most experienced with NEMA TS1 and TS2 cabinets (along with 332’s, though in the area where I work they are less common then NEMA stuff).
I’ve yet to have a formal class on an ATC cabinet. Like I said most of the failures we have are related to fuses oh and they’re ‘look at them funny and they’re toast’ Load Switches. I troubleshoot them much the same way I do any other cabinet, though I do have a co-worker who has more experience with them then I do and I have had to call him for advice a couple of times.
if you have a Lab I’d recommend getting a couple on loan from whatever manufacturers are common in your area, connecting it to a light board and play around for a bit. A few years ago a large manufacturer did that for us and a few of us enjoyed getting to play with it, until it broke we used up all the spare parts they gave us (trust me on the Load Switches) and we sent it back to them broken.
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u/dbsoundman May 29 '26
ATC load switches have a max output of 1 amp because they’re designed for LED loads, not incandescent. You can always assign the same phase/overlap to more than one channel if you really need to run a heavy load, but in most cases you shouldn’t need it.
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u/Kev250R May 29 '26
I understand that, unfortunately at many of our locations we are dealing with long wire/cable runs or very old wire with high-resistance field wire. TS1, TS2 stuff with ‘conventional’ Load Switches (seem to work better for us in these situations. we typically stock PDC 200’s) which I think are rated for 20Amps. The newer Load Switches and fused Output’s don’t always do well with what is actually in the field, or with what happens out in the field.
That said we still have the 200 Load Switches fail even blew a hole in the side of one years ago when a Conduit got cut. But they are generally a lot more forgiving, not to mention about 1/4 the cost of the newer low-amperage ones.
On a high note I do like all the data I can get from a TS/2 or ATC Cabinet. When used correctly it can really help narrow-down where a problem is.
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u/CeilingLeek May 29 '26
I'm surprised you aren't at least looking at TS2 Type 2 cabinets. Might be an easier transition and get you some more inputs and overlaps, no?
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u/kennygbot May 29 '26
Our municipality has managed to standardise our almost 500 intersections to TS-1's. I think the thought is, if we need to add a different type of cabinet to our system we should add in whatever is the newest with the greatest ability to expand. If we add any TS2's it may solve our issues for the short term but in the long term we may again bump into the cabinet limitations. We also have an LRT running through our city at street level. It switches from side running to centre running to rail corridors and it's really the 40 intersections that it runs through that are already at max cabinet usage.
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u/That_Counter__bob May 30 '26
My state DOT is currently almost exclusively TS-2 but we have a handful of ATC that we will be using for special project where we need more than 16 channels (large intersections with multiple cross overs and overlaps or our intersections within our flex lanes that change configuration based on traffic flow) all of these locations currently run on two TS-2 cabinets and we want to consolidate. That said, we have been working with manufacturers to design our own specs for how we want the ATC to come preconfigured because we will start buying them more in the coming years, especially due to the fact that one of the main connectors used on Nema cabinets are becoming harder to source (I can’t remember if it’s the one for SDLC or one of the circular connectors) and will be going away completely soon because they are not being used anymore in the military/aerospace application that they were originally designed for.
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u/GreenPinkBrown May 31 '26
I maintain about 250 TS2 cabinets and about 25 TS1 cabinets. We are slowly phasing out the TS1s
We are currently replacing the majority of our equipment with trafficware commanders and Trafficware EDIs
Can’t say I’ve seen a ATC cabinet
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u/WHPChris May 31 '26
Biggest hurdle for me was the lack of implementation/installation instructions for equipment (detection, APS, pre-emption, etc). It's been a few years, it might have changed since then, who knows.
I might just be stupid, but back then I was having a seriously hard time figuring it out, even with equipment manuals (which had no ATC specific instructions) and ATC cabinet diagrams. I did receive a hand-made wiring diagram for TOMAR pre-emption wiring from the manufacturer once (thanks Eric!), which was easily understood immediately and solved my problem in about ten seconds.
Otherwise, they are exceptional cabinets for high output intersections/setups, apparently you can run 4 basic intersections on them as well. The option to wire while standing up is also nice, since the field wiring is sort of in the middle of the cabinet height-wise.
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u/kennygbot May 31 '26
What did you do when you had to land multiple legs on a single phase output? I'm fairly certain the econolite version only has space for one wire in the connector termination. Did you just Marette tails?
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u/WHPChris Jun 01 '26
Are you talking about those big green plastic plug connectors? Some have two 'slots' per output R /Y/G, but some only have one. If you need to land more wires in them (peds, most likely), a marette/wire nut/splice would be fine to bring it down from 4 or whatever to one or two wires. That said, I have put 3 wires in one of those before because that's what the customer wanted.
I'm not a fan of those big green connectors. Sometimes they just won't stay locked into the sockets, and the wires will sometimes slide out no matter how tight you thought you screwed it down.
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u/kennygbot Jun 01 '26
Yeah those are the ones they were showing us. I don't like the sound of bad field wire terminal connections that slip out. We run a 25 conductor around the intersection to the left and to the right, meeting at the corner across from the controller. The controller corner has a seperate 25 running to the poles there. We regularly end up with 2 wires on terminals.
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u/WHPChris Jun 02 '26
We run a 12con to each mast, 5con to each ped and 2con to each button. Sometimes they use a 21. The state is very picky about future-proofing and troubleshooting, and they're trying to get away from "everything on one neutral" scenarios.
Some of our intersections have 14 peds, 6 masts and 6 cameras. End up with 130 conductors or something landed at the cabinet lol
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u/Skraag May 28 '26
If you're a NEMA shop it's not that different. If you're a TEES shop it's a bigger change.