The paper presents the implementation of a railway control system, as a means of assessing the potential of coordination languages to be used for modelling software architectures for complex control systems using a components-based approach. Moreover, with this case study we assess and understand the issues of real time, fault tolerance, scalability, extensibility, distributed execution and adaptive behaviour, while modelling software architectures. We concentrate our study on the so-called controlor eventdriven coordination languages, and more to the point we use the language Manifold. In the process, we develop a methodology for modelling software architectures within the framework of control-oriented coordination languages. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000. 1823 177 186 Sponsors: Conference code: 126479