Abstract
When a fault occurs on railway feeders it is very important to detect the fault to protect trains and facilities. Because a DC railway system has low feeder voltage, The fault current can be smaller than the current of load starting. So it is important to discriminate between the small fault current and the load starting current. The load starting current increases step by step but the fault current increases at one time. So the type of $\Delta$I/ relay(50F) was developed using the different characteristics between the load starting current and the fault current. The load starting current increases step by step so the time constant of each step is much smaller than that of the fault current. First, to detect faults in DC railway systems, an algorithm using the time constant calculated by the method of least squares is presented in this paper. If a fault occurs on DC railway systems it is necessary to find a fault location to repair the faulted system as soon as possible. The second aim of the paper is to calculate the accurate fault location using Kirchhoff's voltage law.
