Fort Canning Tunnel

The S$34 million vehicular Fort Canning Tunnel (FCT) in Singapore took three years to complete and opened in January 2007.Local Dynalite distributor Control Tech Asia, supplied a lighting control system for the 350m unidirectional three-lane tunnel, which transports motorists from Marina Centre to Orchard Road, bypassing two major traffic junctions and cutting travel time from around five minutes to just under twenty seconds.

With a total landmass of just under 700km, space is at a premium in Singapore and the tunnel is located under historic Fort Canning Hill, where the earliest Singaporean colonists settled. This combination of factors made the project a particularly sensitive undertaking. Rather than dig a pit, build a tunnel and re-cover the space with earth, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) resolved to dig straight through the hill, resulting in preservation of trees and surrounding parkland.

Dynalite was chosen for this project as the system provides a robust and easy to implement integration platform for connection to other vendors system, in this case a Thorn Lighting photometric camera, and the LTA’ s supervisory SCADA system.


Tunnel lighting control aims to keep light levels constant as drivers enter the portal and to avoid any drastic changes throughout the length of the passage. Essential elements in this type of application include reliable fault reporting. The FCT through relay control provided via 12 channel DIN rail mounted relay devices. The lighting control system switches through nine available present lighting modes, which correspond with outside light levels as detected by a photometric camera,

A Dynalite DUS704 sensor automatically provides backup photometric data should the primary photometric camera fail. The Dynalite system connects to the LTA’ s own SCADA system and updates the LTA control centre with system status information, including fault reporting for Dynalite equipment and the photometric camera. A key switch user control panel (DPNE808J) alternates the lighting control network from ‘automatic’ to manual mode , enabling present changes to be carried out via the SCADA system if required. The lighting control network is compartmentalised into four subsections by DDNG485 optically isolated bridge nodes, to minimise the impact of the cabling faults.