Inside Track January 2022

January 2022

January 2022 | Issue 5 railbusinessdaily.com

MAINTAINING BRITAIN’S RAILWAYS

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The endless work that keeps the railway running 1,985 possessions over Christmas and New Year

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Managing obsolescence and minimising risk Maintaining technology that spans 170 years Alternative fuels for the plant hire industry

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Contents

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Tel: 0800 046 7320 Sales: 020 7062 6599 Editor Nigel Wordsworth nigel@rbdpublications.com Writers Danny Longhorn Dave Windass Rachel Groves Graham Coombs Designer/Production Manager Chris Cassidy Production Editor James Jackaman Print Manager Rachael Dean Advertising Team Christian Wiles – chris@rbdpublications.com Freddie Neal – freddie@rbdpublications.com Elliot Gates – elliot@rbdpublications.com Amy Hudson – amy@rbdpublications.com Published by RBD Publications Ltd, Suite 37, Philpot House, Station Road, Rayleigh, Essex, SS6 7HH. Printed by Stephens & George © 2022 All rights reserved. Reproduction of the contents of this magazine in any manner whatsoever is prohibited without prior consent from the publisher.

For subscription enquiries and to make sure you get your copy of InsideTrack please ring 0800 046 7320 or email subscriptions@rbdpublications.com The views expressed in the articles reflect the author’s opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher and editor.

The published material, adverts, editorials and all other content is published in good faith.

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Maintaining Britain’s Railways

Britain’s railways are a form of public transport, as are buses, coaches, taxis and aeroplanes. However, the public has a different perception of the railways…

6

Integrated Rail Plan – some people have “lost the plot”

Network Rail’s chief executive Andrew Haines has spoken out on the public reaction to the government’s Integrated Rail Plan.

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Did you have a good Christmas?

Network Rail did. Together with its contractors, the infrastructure owner delivered 1,900 pieces of work over 4,500 sites.

24

To Poupart’s and beyond!

A good example of the type of work undertaken by Network Rail over the Christmas and New Year holiday could be found at Poupart’s junction in south London.

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Planning for success

Many people see railway maintenance as being carried out by a small group of orangeclad figures working alongside the railway, but there is a lot more to it than that.

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High-speed rail signalling maintenancet

Railways depend on an effective signalling system – its functionality and reliability are critical to ensure the safe operation of the network.

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Powering tomorrow’s plant

As the railway moves towards its net-zero-carbon goal, what fuel will the plant hire industry be using to power its machinery in 14 years’ time, and what equipment should it be buying now?

3

52

The challenge of signalling maintenance

Signalling is perhaps the most complex and safety critical system on the railway, resulting in a maintenance challenge that is equally complex.

62

Switching from Dates to Data

Optimising maintenance and operational costs is one of the biggest challenges facing the railway industry today.

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Maintaining the Great British Railway

Lucy Prior explains how early involvement in major projects can help even the railway’s smaller suppliers.

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Why the digitisation of train presentation is essential

Toby Hawkins explains why it’s crucial that train operators invest in digitising train presentation ahead of rail reform.

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Automating one of the world’s oldest metro systems

Glasgow Subway is in the middle of a major upgrade, only the third in its history, that will see the introduction of a new fleet of driverless trains.

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Managing obsolescence

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Llanelli goods shed returns to life

Stuart Broadbent describes how, as technology develops, the rail industry can mitigate the risk of obsolescence as today’s ‘latest thing’ rapidly becomes yesterday’s obsolete model.

Restoring a 19th century railway asset that hasn’t been used for nearly 60 years is certainly a ‘maintenance and renewals’ challenge.

Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

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Introduction

Maintaining Britain’s Railways Britain’s railways are a form of public transport, as are buses, coaches, taxis and aeroplanes. Passenger trains share the tracks with freight trains, but then cars and buses share the motorways with heavy lorries

H

A year round service The rail industry accepts these double standards, however unfair they may be. It strives to run a fast, punctual service for 363 days of the year. Only on Christmas Day and Boxing Day is the railway closed, and the popular press even complains about that. Yet the railway is not an inanimate object. It is a ‘living’ thing, an engineering masterpiece and system that is expected to work perfectly all day every day.

We service our car at regular intervals. We visit the doctor and the dentist to service our bodies.

railbusinessdaily.com

“

The railway is not an inanimate object. It is a ‘living’ thing, an engineering masterpiece and system that is expected to work perfectly all day every day

“

owever, the public has a different perception of the railways, expecting much more from them than the other forms of transport.

We have all experienced delays on the roads.

We crawl along at 5mph because of an accident, or roadworks, or simply ‘congestion’, and do nothing more than grumble about it when we finally reach our destination. We even accept being totally stationary for an hour or two, getting out of our cars and making conversation with fellow travellers stuck in the same unmoving jam.

When meeting friends or family at the airport, we are never surprised when their plane is an hour or more late – we simply go to the café for a cup of coffee while we read the paper.

But if our train is even 15 minutes late, we want our money back. If a line is closed for a few hours, it’s in all the papers and on the television news under headlines proclaiming ‘Travel Chaos’.

So we need to get our railway serviced regularly too. That process is called maintenance and renewals.

It’s a side of the railway that’s not often seen by the travelling public. A rail worker in orange PPE

5

and hard hat is sometimes seen walking through a station, or at a refreshment kiosk. There may be a white Network Rail van parked outside.

Looking out of the train windows, a group of orange figures may be seen, often waving at the train (actually, they are showing the driver that they are aware of the passing train – it’s part of the safety protocol).

Then there are the worksites, piles of sleepers, rails and the large white bags that builders’ merchants seem to use to deliver sand and chippings for driveways (or, in this case, track ballast). There may also be a white van or two, a few people in orange, and a rather strangelooking digger parked to one side.

But that’s all that most people see of the 17,000 people that work for Network Rail on maintenance and renewals.

Behind the scenes, the maintainers do everything from greasing point mechanisms to replacing complete life-expired bridges.

Some work they can do on their own, for others they need to call in extra or specialist help – designers, surveyors, engineers, plant operators, overhead line installers and signal engineers.

This issue is about those people, the work they do and the machinery they use to do it. As you read, spare a thought for them – they are the ones who work all night so your train won’t be 15 minutes late the next day.

Nigel Wordworth Managing Editor RBD Publications

January 2022

Andrew Haines

Integrated Rail Plan – some people have “lost the plot” Network Rail’s chief executive Andrew Haines has spoken out on the public reaction to the government’s Integrated Rail Plan, calling much of it “profoundly unhelpful, imbalanced and wrong”

“A

£96 billion programme which will transform rail services in the North and the Midlands, the largest single rail investment ever made by a UK government.

“This unprecedented commitment to build a world-class railway that delivers for passengers and freight, for towns and cities, for communities and businesses, will benefit eight out of the top 10 busiest rail corridors across the North and Midlands, providing faster journeys, increased capacity and more frequent services, up to 10 years sooner than previously planned.”

That was how Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps announced the UK Government’s Integrated Rail Plan (IRP) last November, saying that it will transform both east to west and north to south links, build three new high-speed lines, improve rail services to and between the East and West Midlands and the North.

However, the huge investment wasn’t met with open arms. Transport for the North said it was “failing to pull the infrastructure out of the Victorian age”, with the group’s then interim chair describing it as “woefully inadequate”. The Railway Industry Association welcome some of the projects, but voiced concerns that the approach was “piecemeal”.

Now, Network Rail’s chief executive has hit out at those who have complained that the IRP is a kick in the teeth and has failed to deliver, saying complaints are doing the industry “an enormous disservice with the Treasury, particularly at a time when the economics of the railway are really challenging”.

Speaking at a rail industry press round table, he said: “The rhetoric that has been developed around the IRP nationally has been profoundly unhelpful, imbalanced and wrong.

“I’m not going to comment on the extent to which people might feel that they didn’t get everything that they thought they’d been promised, but the hyperbole that’s been applied

January 2022

“

I just don’t get it. I think people have lost the plot, absolutely, big time, on this

“

A failure to deliver?

to this has been damaging and has done us a disservice.”

As announced, the IRP includes: orthern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) connecting N Leeds and Manchester in 33 minutes, down from 55 minutes currently;

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S2 East running direct from central H Nottingham to Birmingham in 26 minutes, down from 1 hour 14 minutes now, from central Nottingham to London in 57 minutes, and from London to Sheffield in 1 hour 27 minutes; S2 West running from London to H Manchester in 1 hour 11 minutes and from Birmingham to Manchester in 41 to 51 minutes, compared to 86 minutes today.

Huge opportunity Andrew continued: “There is a huge level of investment in the IRP and, yes, it isn’t everything that people might have been expecting, but a lot of those expectations were never grounded in anything like a collective business case that could stand alongside all the other demands of infrastructure investment.

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Andrew Haines

Nothing to say Andrew said that his decision to stay quiet when the IRP was released was because he saw his views as “no help to anybody”.

“I thought a defence of IRP, frankly, wasn’t newsworthy for anybody and I recognised that the IRP was not a product of Network Rail,” he said.

railbusinessdaily.com

“

We’re getting on with delivering the Transpennine Route Upgrade, which is the single biggest thing we can do for the Integrated Rail Plan, certainly in the next five years, if not the next decade

“

“I’m not saying that there isn’t a notional economic case for it, but like we all do in our personal and business lives, we have to weigh up competing demands. The IRP presents a huge opportunity for the railway to deliver transformational change.”

Andrew pointed to the Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU) as an example. TRU is a multibillion-pound, transformative, long-term railway infrastructure programme that will improve connectivity in the North.

“I joined Network Rail three and a half years ago when the TRU was a £3.5 billion project. It is now closer to a £10 billion project,” he said.

“This isn’t because of its cost escalation, but actually because of scope changes. It is now a fully electrified project, it’s an ETCS (European Train Control System) project and it’s now got key parts of IRP factored into it.

“In a normal, rational world, that would bring a sense of huge celebration in an industry like ours. Instead, somehow, the dialogue of IRP has become one of it is being a catastrophic disaster of cataclysmic proportions and that the future of our industry is so utterly dire.

“I just don’t get it. I think people have lost the plot, absolutely, big time, on this. The immensity of the challenge to deliver IRP, even setting aside the bits of it which are quite vague, the very tangible bits, we should not underestimate. There are huge amounts to do in that regard.”

“I’m not in any sense dismissing that, but it was absolutely a process that was run by the government and by the Department for Transport, with some input from us, but that input was relatively modest.

“To me I felt there was no point adding to a load of noise that was going in the wrong direction.”

The Integrated Rail Plan, using a mixture of new-build high speed lines and upgraded conventional lines, was drawn up after it became clear that the full HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail schemes, as originally proposed, would have

7

cost up to £185 billion and not entered service until the early to mid-2040s.

On its release, the government said that building on the expert findings of wide-ranging internal and independent analysis, including from the National Infrastructure Commission, the IRP will deliver better outcomes for passengers in a faster and more efficient way than under original plans for the schemes.

“We’ve got a huge amount to do to understand how and when we deliver IRP, and you’ll hear more from Network Rail on that when there’s a well-developed plan that we’ve been able to help shape and influence,” he said.

“In the meantime, we’re getting on with delivering the TRU, which is the single biggest thing we can do for IRP, certainly in the next five years, if not the next decade.”

Workforce Andrew also told the assembled rail media that Network Rail is preparing to open a compulsory redundancy programme in order to reduce its headcount, as the organisation looks to make £1.5 billion of efficiencies within five years.

He said that 1,200 staff and management grades have left voluntarily through a scheme that started last autumn, and 1,000 others had applications for voluntary redundancy rejected as Network Rail wished to retain them.

Network Rail has been adding around 1,000 to its headcount every year for the past 10 years. It now needs to cut back, due to the reduced number of railway travellers and government financial pressure, and the voluntary scheme will not be sufficient.

“That will not be enough to meet the scale of financial challenge that the industry faces,” he said. “We are being very transparent about that and we are talking with the trade unions about being explicit on that front.”

January 2022

Christmas work

Did you have a good Christmas?

Image: Network Rail

Network Rail did. Together with its contractors, the infrastructure owner delivered 1,900 pieces of work over 4,500 sites, with more than 99 per cent of them handed back on time. It was a masterful piece of planning and delivery

Neasden bridge replacement

January 2022

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Christmas work

Image: Rail Systems Alliance Scotland

G

etting access to the railway to undertake maintenance is becoming more and more problematic. Pre-COVID, with weekday trains busy with commuters and those travelling on business, no operator wanted to give up train paths to allow Network Rail to maintain the railway. That left a narrow window of opportunity in the dead of night or at weekends, when trains were quieter without their business travellers and could more easily be cancelled or re-routed.

However, post-COVID, even those opportunities are harder to come by. The earlyhours slots are still there – varying in length from four to six hours – but, now that the railway is being proportionately more heavily used by tourists and leisure travellers, operators don’t want to give up weekend trains.

Bank holidays used to be one solution – a third day added to the weekend when passenger numbers were down and longer work could be carried out. But again, with leisure now an increasingly important part of operators’ fare income, that is becoming difficult.

That leaves the Christmas and New Year holiday as almost the only opportunity for Network Rail and its contractors to carry out work

Uddingston

that would just take too long to do in a normal working week.

No trains run on Christmas Day, and only a few airport shuttle services run on Boxing Day. So, in most parts of the country, that gives engineers two clear days for uninterrupted work.

Some services stop early on Christmas Eve,

others start late on 27 December 27 or are even postponed altogether over the holiday week.

Reduced timetables operate over New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. With 2 January being a Sunday this year, and the Monday being a bank holiday, normal train services didn’t have to be resumed until Tuesday 4 January 2022.

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Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Christmas work

As a result, across the Christmas and New Year period, Network Rail and the rail supply chain delivered more than £133 million of engineering work from the evening of Friday 24 December 2021 through to the early hours of Tuesday 4 January 2022.

Teams worked at over 4,500 sites across more than 1,900 possessions, delivering major enhancements as well as core renewals and maintenance works around the rail network.

Over Christmas 2007, possession overruns at Shields junction, Liverpool Street and Rugby had a major financial and reputational impact on Network

Rail. To try to ensure this state of affairs was never repeated, the Delivering Work Within Possessions (DWWP) standard was developed from industry best practices. Since its launch in 2009, it has continually been developed and improved, based on feedback from across the business.

Under the DWWP standard, all worksites are assessed to identify if there is a risk of a possession overrun – a high risk (RED) score is the trigger to schedule and implement a serious of mandated and best practice risk mitigation processes.

Of the work carried out over Christmas and New Year 2021/22, 42 projects covering 77

Uddingston S&C Scotland

Seasonal highlights Despite resourcing challenges imposed by the ongoing pandemic, many significant projects were delivered across the length and breadth of the country, with a mixture of asset renewal schemes and enhancement schemes to enable future network upgrades.

Tyneside IECC Eastern

Coppull Hall PLTR NW&C

Skelton Jcn (York) Eastern TRU – Church Fenton – Colton Eastern (TRU)

Manchester Victoria East Jcn Eastern (TRU)

Leeds Station Eastern (TRU)

Acton Bridge Drainage NW&C

SPC6/26A Cranfleet Canal Bridge Eastern

Manchester Pic Route Indicators NW&C

Spital Ladder (Peterborough) Eastern

Bilbrook, Albrighton & Oakengates Platform Extensions NW&C

Kilsby Project Alpha NW&C

Birmingham New Street NW&C

Sundon Feeder Station Eastern

Bridge DCL/178 NW&C Wem Road Overbridge W&W

worksites were identified as RED through the DWWP standard, therefore deemed to carry a greater risk of possession overrun and/or a more significant impact in the event of an overrun.

Welwyn to Hitchin Signalling Eastern Cairnryan

Wood Green to New Barnet Relock Eastern

EWR Bletchley NW&C

Liverpool St Station Roof Eastern

West London Junction NW&C

Bethnal Green P2 / Hackney Downs P3 Eastern Bethnal Green – Goodmayes OLE Eastern

Ocean Canal Underbridge W&W

Stratford OLE Eastern

Paddington Line 3 PLTR W&W Ilkeston

Goodmayes – Shenfield OLE Eastern

Paddington to West Drayton E&P W&W

General’s Lane Bridge Eastern

Paddington Train Detection W&W

FSS1 512 Morris Street Eastern

Fishguard & Goodwick

P2R ETCS W&W

Bridges 507a/508b & 512 (Morris Street) Eastern

Bristol Parkway / Stoke Gifford W&W

Kentish Town Slab Track Eastern

South Hampstead PLTR NW&C

NCL Digital Railway Eastern

Courthill S&C Southern

CAW 6 Intersection Bridge Eastern

Lipson Down PLTR W&W

January 2022

Pouparts S&C Southern

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railbusinessdaily.com

Christmas work

The highlights included: he commissioning of major upgrades to the T track layout, signalling and OLE in the vicinity of Leeds station as part of the Transpennine Route Upgrade; he successful commissioning of axle counters T between Paddington and Stockley on the Great Western main line during Christmas Day and Boxing Day; enewal of Spital Ladder, located on the East R Coast main line at Peterborough; Image: Network Rail

enewal of Uddingston junction near R Glasgow using new technology in the form of UnistarHR point machines; ridge renewals/replacements completed in B nine locations across England and Wales; S &C renewals at Poupart’s junction and at Courthill in south London.

With Network Rail now devolved on a regional basis, each region planned and prepared its own work over the holiday period.

Cranfleet Cut is a pair of single-span bridges carrying two non-electrified tracks of the Trenton

Manchester

South Jn to Ratcliffe North Jn line, over Cranfleet Canal near New Sawley, Long Eaton in Derbyshire.

One span carries the Up and Down Slow lines, with the adjacent structure carrying the Fast lines.

The existing structure had been found to have inadequate capacity due to its poor condition,

with extensive corrosion, primarily at the connections between the main and cross girders.

Over a 54-hour period, the bridge that carries the Slow lines was removed and replaced with a new Twin U-Deck structure, a process that required 17 lifts with a 1,000-tonne crane.

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Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Christmas work

At the Spital Ladder in Peterborough, a like-forlike renewal of the scissors crossover between the Down Slow lines, the March Independent line and the Down Fast was carried out using a Kirow rail crane. The track panels were so large that moving them from the storage area to site took longer than expected, as they had to be guided around lineside structures, although these delays were largely recovered during the course of the project.

Two sets of points at Whitehall flat crossing were renewed to remove a 20mph temporary speed restriction caused by poor track geometry.

“

Despite resourcing challenges imposed by the ongoing pandemic, many significant projects were delivered across the length and breadth of the country

The Northern City Line (NCL) signalling renewal project will remove all legacy signalling equipment from the NCL and introduce ETCS Level 2, initially as an overlay to facilitate driver training and then as a no-signals railway by January 2024.

The points approaching Moorgate station (scissors) were legacy London Undergroundstyle pneumatic air-driven types that needed replacement.

During the Christmas bank holiday possession, the project team renewed these points using standard MkII Clamplocks – no alterations were required to the track layout as part of these works.

Poupart’s junction

January 2022

Neasden

As part of works to install ETCS signalling on the East Coast main line, three under-track crossings (UTX) were installed in the Welwyn and Hitchin area. One four-track and two two-track crossings were completed as planned.

Image: Chris Denham/Network Rail

Like-for-like renewal

The track was lifted and a 100mm layer of sand, TED4 geotextile and 300mm of new ballast were laid. 86 concrete bearers on sleeper pads were replaced and the steelwork relaid.

The Wood Green and New Barnet Re-lock project replaces existing relay interlockings with new computer-based interlockings based in York ROC. This will allow the existing signalling system to continue to operate safely until it is replaced by ETCS in approximately five years’ time, as part of the ECDP Migration Strategy (Phase 10). Over Christmas 2021, a new Class 2 power distribution arrangement was commissioned and a good start made on testing the new equipment in advance of future work.

“

Stage F1 of the London to Corby Electrification project required the removal of the existing Sundon feeder station (FS) from the overhead line equipment and the permanent removal of its feeding capability to the Midland main line. Much of this work was carried out over the holiday period, with the Sundon bypass switches modified to bypass Long Meadow Farm at the neutral section.

Softening of the London clay base at Kentish Town, caused by a failed drainage system, meant that the slab track in the area needed to be stabilised. The North and Central sections had already been completed, so Christmas 2021 brought an end to the three phases of stabilisation works in the area. A 40-year design life will mean less interruption to passenger trains in the future.

The overhead wires were taken down, screw piles installed and around 1,100 tonnes of existing track slab removed. 90 metres of new drainage was installed, the track made good, although the installation of baseplates on the existing slab took a lot longer than first thought due to the sheer amount of manual work required. On completion, the overhead lines were replaced using new wires.

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Image: Network Rail

Christmas work

Meeting the deadline Working with delivery partner Siemens, the recontrol to the new modular building was successfully completed on time with new Westcad VSCS workstations now fully operational and controlling the railway. As part of this a new SARS system has been commissioned to replace the obsolete ARS system. Other workstation equipment such as GSM-R, HABD, LX CCTV, and the Nexus Tetra system were also successfully transferred to the new workstations in the temporary operating centre.

The commissioning also included the successful migration of telecoms circuits to a new Hi-Path concentrator.

railbusinessdaily.com

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The Leeds Station Capacity Programme is a £126 million programme to improve and increase operational capacity within Leeds station

“

The Tyneside re-control project successfully re-controlled the current IECC Classic VDU-based Signalling Control System (VSCS) workstations onto new Westcad VSCS workstations, which control approximately 1,000 SEUs (signalling equivalent units).

This involved the close co-operation of this project and the ‘Concentrator Renewals’ project delivered by Linbrooke.

The Central Rail Systems Alliance (Network Rail, Balfour Beatty, Atkins and TSO) undertook the renewal of life expired plain line track assets at Skelton. Work included renewing 425 yards (388 metres) of rail, sleepers and ballast on the East Coast main line, with the line welded, stressed and handed back at 60mph rather than at the previous TSR of 50mph.

Three other stretches of plain line were not renewed due to a “possession irregularity”.

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The Leeds Station Capacity Programme is a £126 million programme to improve and increase operational capacity within Leeds station.

The Christmas 2021 works delivered Phase 3b, which completes the functionality and flexibility improvement works linked with the construction of the new Platform 0 and also enables parallel moves between the A-C lines and Platforms 0-6 at the west end of Leeds station.

Further work at Leeds Between 25 December 2021 and 4 January 2022, during a series of full and partial closures aimed at keeping passenger disruption to a minimum, the track layout at Leeds station was amended and associated changes were made to the overhead line equipment and the signalling. Platform 7, at the east end of the station, was extended to enable four-car working, further increasing the station’s capacity. In addition, a new six-track UTX (under-track crossing) to the west of the station was installed to increase cable route capacity.

Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Demolitions A new Radial Distributor Road is being constructed as part of the Beaulieu Development near Chelmsford. This will cross over the railway at the same location as the existing Generals Lane bridge, which needed to be removed/demolished.

This was successfully carried out by John F Hunt Demolitions and the site was handed back 20 hours early.

Manchester

“

The track and signalling systems are being enhanced to create a more resilient, reliable railway for passengers

“

Finally, the Leeds capacity team integrated its plans and acted as principal contractor for works undertaken by Network Rail’s works delivery unit to re-ballast and re-sleeper the Whitehall flat crossing, which had been prioritised to improve asset reliability in and around Leeds station.

Track and overhead line (OLE) adjustments were made at Colton junction and signalling works between Church Fenton and Colton as part of the Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU) east of Leeds. The track and signalling systems are being enhanced to create a more resilient, reliable railway for passengers.

West of Leeds, the TRU team renewed switches and crossings at the eastern side of Manchester Victoria station on the Up and Down Rochdale Slow lines. Follow-up work was carried out over New Year, along with the installation of 800 metres of overhead wire runs. These works were the next stage for TRU W1 (West phase 1) leading to signalling recontrol and ultimately line speed increases planned for June 2022.

Image: Wesley Lydiate/Amey

Christmas work

A 100-hour possession of the Camden Road bridge started at 00:01 on Christmas morning so that engineers could replace the deteriorated deck plates and wheel timbers across both spans of the bridge and reinstate new timbers and rail.

This was to allow trains of up to RA10 (Route

Availability 10 – up to 25.4 tonnes axle weight) to cross the bridge at 20mph. Crash decking scaffold was implemented to carry out the deck replacement works.

East London work The Stratford Rewire project is replacing the existing fixed tension overhead line electrification equipment with a modern auto-tensioned design in the Stratford to Maryland area. The project will renew 19 wire runs and install eight new structures along with replacement of OLE switches, neutral sections and section insulators associated with these wire runs.

Image: Network Rail

Poupart’s junction

Wembley

January 2022

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Christmas work

Image: Chris Denham/Network Rail

During the Christmas to New Year possession 2021/22, the project renewed a further four wire runs and removed a number of redundant structures. The project has now completed 18 of the 19 wire runs as the work nears completion.

Under capacity

Courthill

“

At the enhanced stations, both Romford and Ilford, the Christmas delivery of the planned works carried on ahead of station completion in 2022

“

The Cricklewood Span of the CAW 6 Intersection bridge was deemed to be under capacity following a survey undertaken in 2013.

During a 128-hour possession, the structure was replaced to meet RA8 (up to 22.8 tonnes) loading at 40mph. The works were delivered as part of the CP6 structure renewals by Network Rail and J Murphy & Sons.

The new structure will have 120-year design life, removing the need for regular closures (freight and LUL) for repair and strengthening works.

Another bridge replacement was carried out at 512 Morris Street. This was a like-for-like replacement of the main steel structure, with the existing brick jack arches being replaced by steel plates. The existing track was removed, the existing brick jack arches demolished and the old bridge structure lifted out. After the new steel structure had been lifted in and the track reinstated, including tamping, the site was handed back to the Docklands Light Railway and Network Rail on time with no accidents or incidents.

The bridge at nearby Christian Street was also renewed. The existing steel structure with brick jack arches was successfully replaced by precast cills and planks.

At Fenchurch Street, the existing steel structure was strengthened by the addition of new bottom hat sections and steel grillage supports, instead of being replaced completely.

The bridge arches were rented by tenants of Network Rail’s Commercial Estate, so they had to be relocated and the arch fit-outs removed so the bridge could be upgraded. The structure was then propped and jacked and also monitored for movement while the bridge was refurbished.

Work on all three bridges (Morris Street, Christian Street and Fenchurch Street) had to be coordinated as they all used the same resources and formed part of the same worksite/possession.

To complete the programme of work on Eastern Region, the Traction Power Project undertook Short Circuit Testing (SCT) of the designed and

built +/-25 kV Autotransformer (AT) traction supply system. There were no permanent modifications to the physical infrastructure, although the teams also removed the two Track Switching Cabins (TSC) located at Gidea Park.

The residual Crossrail Anglia works programme completed the troughing install at Bow Feeder station for the new switches that will be installed in the upcoming disruptive access and also cast a foundation for a switching structure at Manor Park.

At the enhanced stations, both Romford and Ilford, the Christmas delivery of the planned works carried on ahead of station completion in 2022.

North West and Central Region Birmingham New St Area Resignalling Phase 7 will be commissioned at Christmas 2022 in a 54-hour all-lines possession that will see the closure of Birmingham New Street Power Signal Box and the control of signalling transferred to the West Midlands Signalling Centre (WMSC).

Image: Network Rail

Manchester

January 2022

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Christmas work

Ocean Bridge, Stroud

To support the final commissioning, this Christmas saw a variety of works, inclusive of Signal Rehearsal Stage 02 on the Stour lines and the addition of Bromsgrove to the Birmingham New Street Network Management system.

Canal Bridge at Stratford-upon-Avon had failed assessments due to significant corrosion and loss of section to critical structural elements.

The bank holiday works involved the removal of track and the existing bridge deck, followed by installation of a new deck with track reinstated.

This was a complex operation requiring two Kirow cranes and a mobile crane in a field 500 metres away to lift in the new bridge components and remove the old ones. The new bridge opened at the planned 50mph TSR, which will be removed in the following weeks.

which themselves need refurbishing. Around 250 metres of sleepers and rails were successfully installed on the Down Bletchley. However, works on the Up Bletchley were curtailed due to the partial derailment of an engineering train locomotive.

This also caused a 1hour 20mins delay handing the worksite back on Monday morning, although there was no impact to operational traffic.

Plain line track at Coppull Hall had been

identified as life expired. The existing rail and sleepers were removed and loaded into trains for removal. The track bed was excavated to 450mm, and sand was installed prior to the ballast, sleepers then rail. The site was fully welded then tamped and handed back at 60mph.

West London Junction is located on the West Coast main line, five miles north of London Euston.

Work continued on East West Rail, the project that will connect the economic centres of Oxford, Milton Keynes, Aylesbury and Bedford by reconstructing and upgrading the partially mothballed Oxford–Bicester–Bletchley–Bedford and the Princes Risborough–Aylesbury–Claydon Junction lines.

Engineering trains will access the Oxford to Bedford line via the Up and Down Bletchley lines,

January 2022

Ribble Bridge, Preston

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Image: Network Rail

Making connections

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Image: Chris Denham/Network Rail

Christmas work

Courthill

A busy junction used by freight, local commuter and national services, West London Junction also provides access/egress to Willesden depot, reception sidings and Euro Terminal sidings.

The planned work was to deliver track and drainage works simultaneously. While 151 yards (138 metres) of plain line track was successfully

renewed, along with 140 yards (128 metres) of drainage in the six-foot, a further 162 yards (148 metres) of drainage was curtailed due to multiple machinery breakdowns and poor ground conditions due to weather.

Another drainage scheme, at Acton Bridge station on the West Coast main line, was more successful.

The remit asked the Central Rail Systems Alliance to install new drainage throughout the station to improve drainage flow and help with track quality.

This meant 328metres of drainage was renewed, along with 10 new catch pits. A UTX was installed to take the drainage from the six-foot to the Down cess, then through to the outfall.

South Hampstead, three miles north of London Euston, is located on a third-rail DC route that services local commuters between Camden and Watford Junction. Here 802 yards (733 metres) of track was renewed, fully welded and stressed, although with a 14-minute overrun.

Scotland The only RED project in Scotland over Christmas and the New Year was the major track renewal at Uddingston, on the West Coast main line between Motherwell and Glasgow. Four point-ends were replaced, along with a total of 1,039 yards (950 metres) of plain line. Progress Rail supplied the first-of-type NR60 Mk2 double junction, which included a switch diamond, while the Voestalpine Unistar HR point machines were also new to the UK, although they have been in use elsewhere for some time.

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Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

en

Christmas work

Another major S&C renewal was at Courthill, near Lewisham. Eight units were replaced at Courthill South (four switches, two switch diamonds) and a further three units at Courthill North (two switches, one fixed diamond) along with their associated plain line track – 480 and 140 metres respectively. All of the planned works were completed in three stages over Christmas and New Year.

Phase 3 of the Victoria Resignalling scheme involves the renewal of signalling assets between Clapham Streatham and Streatham Hill and the recontrol of the area to Three Bridges Rail Operating Centre, including the West London lines.

The 2021/22 blockade at Christmas was a critical install phase, working towards Phase 2 commissioning at Christmas 2022.

“

These upgrades will help ensure we continue to run a safe and reliable railway for years to come

As well as 16,500 metres of power, fibre and quad cables were installed and 24,000 metres of PnP three-wire cables. Also as part of the Victoria Resignalling and Recontrol project, two turnouts were renewed at Pouparts Junction near Clapham, along with around 200 metres of plain line.

These were life-expired assets, with their

Stratford

January 2022

replacements having improved geometry and modern materials for improved resilience. All of the planned works were completed within the 10-day blockade at Victoria.

Wales and Western A life-expired underbridge at Wem Road was replaced using a self-propelled modular transporter (SPMT). The existing track and ballast were removed, followed by demolition of the existing structure and excavation, installation of the new bridge, backfilling, the addition of drainage, waterproofing and the collision beams.

The track and ballast were reinstated and then tamped, stressed and welded.

Track 3 at London Paddington was renewed to reduce the risk of future speed restrictions and to improve track quality, where 220 yards (201 metres) of track was replaced, using three engineering trains and a tamper. Between Paddington and Airport junction, where the Great Western main line turns off into Heathrow over the Stickley viaduct, some 700 obsolete Reed track circuits were replaced by modern Frauscher axle counters, improving reliability.

Image: Network Rail

Southern Region

During 10-day, 14-part possession, the project delivered six complex signalling structures, four signal posts, one UTX, one signalling location staging, excavation of a signalling cable route through Clapham Platform 13, delivery of one signalling relocatable equipment building, one principal supply point, 14 signalling location cases, three functional supply points, 38 axle counters, 27 AWS and 26 TPWS installations.

“

The Rail Systems Alliance Scotland (Network Rail, Babcock and Arcadis) completed the work on time, handing the site back at 50mph as planned, with the help of Story Contracting, Trimble and Speedy.

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Christmas work

In addition, five new workstations were commissioned in the Thames Valley Signalling Centre at Didcot, along with the provision of four new scalable systems for infrastructure changes and the reconfiguration of interlocking and control systems.

Courthill

new open structure, which will allow boats to pass through for the first time since 1968.

The track on Filton East Curve was replaced, 1125 yards (1028 metres) of ballast, sleepers and rail was renewed, along with a further 13 yards (11 metres) of just rail. The old track was cut up into 30-foot panels and removed before the new track was laid with the help of 15 engineering trains and two tampers.

Two point ends were replaced at Stoke Gifford, which was adjacent to Filton East Curve and part of the same worksite.

The Bristol Area Signalling Renewal & Enhancement (BASRE) scheme is renewing signalling assets in the Bristol area. OSL successfully commissioned the Datalink diversity for Vixl23 at Bristol over the Christmas period on behalf of Alstom. More than 2,500 metres of

Ribble Bridge, Preston

January 2022

datalink cable was installed and commissioned in multiple location cabinets to enable diversity for the Datalink. A new rock fall shelter was installed over the north portal of Parsons Tunnel to mitigate the impact of poor weather on the operation and safety of the railway. The new portal will protect the railway from rock fall from the cliffs above while still allowing passengers to enjoy coastal views.

Into 2022 Piling commenced over Christmas. A gantry crane will continue the work and install precast concrete sections in February 2022, with project completion forecast for September 2022.

The New Track Construction (NTC) train was used on the Down Main between Laira and Lipson junctions.

Image: Network Rail

Location cases, cables and other equipment were moved at Old Oak Common and Acton to make room for HS2 and to facilitate a new isolation regime in advance of future HS2 works.

At Reading, two UTXs were successfully installed under the Up and Down Westbury lines.

These will provide a route for the new Reading Independent Feeder cables which, in turn, will provide an alternative mainline feed for the overhead line, adding significant resilience for passenger services through Reading and beyond.

In the same area, OLE snagging and Great Western Electrification Programme (GWEP) closeout work was completed. The testing and commissioning of overhead line switches will allow remote operation and indication of switches for the electrical control room. The works will support the safe taking and handing back of isolations and make the process more efficient.

While the high-level switch work was completed, low-level data comms for only two of 36 switches were completed. This will be followed up in early 2022.

The railway bridge over the canal at the Ocean in Stonehouse, Stroud, Gloucestershire, was another one of several replaced around the country. Ocean bridge was replaced on behalf of the Cotswold Canals Connected Project, and engineers also converted the current culvert to a

Image: Chris Denham/Network Rail

HS2 work

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Christmas work

The existing track had previously been cleared by being burned into panels. The spoil was also removed, then the alignment bulldozed so that new track could be laid by the NTC. A failed train at the start of the programme caused delays, but this time was recovered during the course of the project.

Overruns In total, 1,985 possessions were booked across the network. Out of these 17 of them overran, representing a successful possession handback rate of 99.1 per cent, which is a slight improvement upon performance during Christmas and New Year 2020. The total of possession overrun delay incurred was 889 minutes, considerably fewer than for the equivalent period during recent years.

Five of the possessions which overran were linked to delivery of a major ‘RED-ranked’ scheme. These were: E astern – Leeds Station Capacity – a 10-minute possession overrun occurred, generating 21 delay minutes, due to delays picking up worksite marker boards as a result of possession staff shortages;

E astern – Sundon Feeder – complications with the installation of an electrical bond saw an overrun of 37 minutes, incurring 16 delay minutes to an empty coaching stock service; ales & Western – Filton East Curve – the late W removal of detonator protection by possession staff during an interim handback on 27 December resulted in an overrun of 11 minutes, incurring 82 delay minutes; E astern – Crossrail Anglia & OLE Renewals – an overrun of 146 minutes occurred, generating 424 delay minutes, caused by failure of the recovery unit on the wiring train during the early stages of the work resulting in the programme shifting; S outhern – Victoria Phase 3 Resignalling – upon moving from part 10 to part 11 of the possession, protection boards had been left in place causing 166 overrun-related delay minutes.

Critical time With 99.1 percent of the possessions handed back on time, it was a good Christmas and New Year programme for Network Rail.

Mike Gallop, Network Rail Western route and strategic operations director, summed up everybody’s feelings when he said: “I’m really pleased with the upgrades our engineers have completed over the festive period.

These upgrades will help ensure we continue to run a safe and reliable railway for years to come – not forgetting also enabling boats to pass through the canal at the Ocean in Stonehouse for the first time since 1968!

“Undertaking this work over the festive period when there are fewest people travelling – particularly with no trains on Christmas Day and very few on Boxing Day – ensured the number of passengers disrupted were kept to a minimum.

However, we are grateful to passengers and local residents living near to our work sites for their patience and understanding while we have undertaken these upgrades.

“The festive period is a really critical time for us to make vital upgrades to the railway and completing £133 million of engineering work is no mean feat, so I’d also like to thank the many men and women from Network Rail who gave up their festive periods so we could complete these upgrades for the benefit of our passengers.”

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Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

P o u p a r t ’s j u n c t i o n

To Poupart’s and beyond!

A good example of the type of work undertaken by Network Rail over the Christmas and New Year holiday could be found at the interestingly titled Poupart’s junction in south London

N

Image: Network Rail

amed after a local 19th-century market garden, now long since covered by London’s urban sprawl, Poupart’s junction is where the Ludgate lines to Clapham Junction are joined by the line from London Victoria and Battersea Park. The junction is almost directly on top of the Culvert Road underbridge, which crosses under no fewer than 11 railway lines at this point.

The area is covered by both phase three of the Victoria Resignalling Programme (VIC3) and the CP6 Sussex Upgrade programme.

The Victoria Resignalling Programme is a four-year package of upgrades to modernise 1980s track and signalling on the lines into London Victoria station. As well as upgrading and replacing equipment, the programme will see signalling control of the area moving from the Victoria Area Signalling Centre to the Three Bridges Rail Operating Centre (ROC).

Southern Capital Delivery -

Signalling - Victoria Re-Signalling Programme

Victoria Resignalling Programme STOP Red Green Clear Wait for Green If no light

Towards NLL

Southern Region

Shepherds Bush

Kensington Olypmpia

Phase Overview Victoria

West Brompton

SCD -Signalling Kent Wessex

Sussex

Christmas 2022. Further upgrades, between Tulse Hill, Peckham Rye and Crystal Palace, and between Herne Hill, Nunhead and the Battersea area, will follow between 2022 and 2025.

Work on the lines between London Victoria, Clapham Junction and Balham, and on the West London lines from Clapham to Shepherds Bush, commenced in 2021 and will continue until after

Towards Kings Cross LNE

Waterloo

Imperial wharf

For more information on the information contact Jamie.Foster@networkrail.co.uk

Vauxhall

Battersea Park

Wandsworth Town

Putney

Blackfriars

Phase 3

Towards Earls Court

London Bridge

Elephant & Castle

Towards Barnes

Towards Deptford

South Bermondsey Clapham Junction

East Putney

Phase 5

Currently Controlled from Victoria Area Signalling Centre (VASC)

Wimbledon Wimbledon Chase South Merton

Wandsworth Common

Tooting

Balham

Works Completed

Mitcham

Crystal Palace

Towards Streatham Common

West Sutton

Towards East Croydon

Carshalton

Norwood Junction

Anerley Penge West Birkbeck

Ewell Cheam East

Three Bridges ROC

Belmond Carshalton Beeches

Recontrol to Three Bridges

Wallington

Catford

Bellingham Beckenham Hill Sydenham

Ravensbourne

Sydenham Hill

Gipsy Hill

Sutton

Banstead

Crofton Park

Forest Hill

West Dulwich

West Norwood

Brockley

North Dulwich

Tulse Hill

Hackbridge

Sutton Common

St Johns Lewisham

Peckham Rye

Honor Oak Park

East Dulwich

Herne Hill

Streatham

Mitcham Junction

Phase 2

Clapham High Street

Phase 4

Streatham Hill

Haydens Road

St Heller

Denmark Hill

Brixton

VASC Wandsworth Road

New Cross

New Cross Gate

Queen’s Rd Peckham Nunhead

Clapham Junction

Wimbledon Park

Morden South

Loughborough Junction

Schemes to be recontrolled to Three bridges ROC

Penge East Kent House

Beckenham Junction

Phase 6

St Mary Faringham Bickley Cray Road Shortland Bromley South

Swanley

Eynsford

New CBI Interlocking Equipment and Workstations installed Provision of Automatic Route Setting

Epsom Downs

January 2022

TBROC

14/08/20

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Cleshar undertake all of the multidiscipline Cleshar undertake all of and the multidiscipline maintenance, response renewal work maintenance, response and renewal on the ELL also responding and fixingwork on the ELL alsoon responding and fixing stations faults the West Anglia route. stations faults on the West Anglia route.

This key arterial metro railway system into Thisheart key arterial metro system the of London hasrailway an exciting mixinto theold heart Londoninfrastructure, has an excitingsuch mixas of andof modern of old and modern infrastructure, as Brunel’s Thames Tunnel (1843) andsuch AZLM Brunel’s Thames Tunnel (1843) and AZLM Axle Counter interlocking signalling systems Axle Counter interlocking signalling systems (2010).

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P o u p a r t ’s j u n c t i o n

Historical note

Phase 3, which is already under way, will deliver:

Accident at Poupart’s junction – 19 February 1868 The 8.58a.m. passenger train from Victoria to London Bridge started from the former station at 8.59 on the day in question. It travelled without stopping, until it approached the Poupart’s Junction at a speed of about 20 miles an hour.

As it rounded the curve on the north of that junction, the leading wheels of the engine dropped off the rails to the right, on the outside of the curve, 33 yards to the south of the viaduct, and 60 yards north of the junction cabin. The engine ran along in this condition to the crossing, 33 yards from the point at which the wheel first mounted, and 27 yards north of the junction cabin. The right wheel struck violently against that crossing, the leading wheels were thrown over to the left of the rails, and as they passed through the junction they strained the points and bent the connecting rods.

After crossing the bridge over the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway and tearing up the permanent way, more or less, in its course, the engine turned to the left, 80 yards south of the junction, and ran down the embankment. It fell on its left side at the bottom of the slope, with its wheels partly in the air. The tender followed it, remaining on its wheels on the side of the slope. The leading break carriage came to a stand behind it, at right angles to the line, also on its wheels, on the side of the slope; and the remaining vehicles stood in their proper order on the embankment, but off the rails.

Capt H W Tyler, Board of Trade, 28 February 1868, Crown Copyright.

93 new, modern LED signals; 1 7 signal gantries, replaced with new easier maintained structures; hree new power supply points for signalling T and points heating equipment; 1 86 new axle counters (train detection equipment); 2 00,000 metres of new signalling, telecoms and power supply cable; E ight key junctions and 50 points renewed to achieve greater track reliability and minimise disruption; econtrol of the Clapham and Balham areas R from the Victoria Area Signalling Centre to the Three Bridges Rail Operating Centre (ROC).

part of its Sussex Railway Upgrades to modernise ageing track, signalling, stations, structures and earthworks to give passengers more reliable journeys.

The signalling and track at key junctions is being replaced on the lines into London Victoria as part of the four-year Victoria Resignalling Programme. Extended closures are being used to

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A larger whole Visiting the Poupart’s junction site, Network Rail’s Southern region director John Halsall commented: “This is a small part of a £160 million resignalling scheme that involves track, switches and crossings and all the signals, gantries and everything.

It’s a massive project that will deliver enhanced reliability and punctuality for our passengers.”

Another major project, this one part of the CP6 Sussex Upgrade programme, was taking

January 2022

place near Lewisham, eight miles to the east of Poupart’s junction. Here, the SRSA renewed 11 units of S&C – four switches and two switch diamonds at Courthill South and two switches and one fixed diamond at Courthill North.

“

It’s a massive project that will deliver enhanced reliability and punctuality for our passengers

“

The work carried out at Poupart’s junction between 25 December 2021 and 3 January 2022 formed part of this work. Two sets of points were replaced, along with their associated plain-line track.

The work was carried out by the South Rail Systems Alliance (SRSA). This brings together Colas Rail UK (constructor), AECOM (designer) and Network Rail to provide an integrated delivery model, principally for the development, design and construction of track renewals for both plain line and switches and crossings (S&C). In addition, the Alliance undertakes associated survey, site investigations, drainage, traction power, signalling (alterations and enhancement), electrification (alterations and enhancements) and platform works (coper alignment and platform extensions).

George Murrell, Network Rail’s programme manager, explained: “We are here at Poupart’s to replace two point-ends and about 200 metres of plain line track. The points are now life-expired, so we are renewing them as their reliability isn’t as it needs to be and we need to make sure our passengers get to their destinations on time.”

Having cut the existing track up into short panels and removed it on an engineering train, contractors then excavated the spent ballast and levelled out the track bed. New ballast was laid over geotextile and then the track relaid.

The two sets of points had already been trial assembled and were then laid in place, the track was welded up, stressed and tamped and the site handed back on time.

Image: Network Rail

P o u p a r t ’s j u n c t i o n

In addition, a total of 620 metres of plain line track was renewed. The net result was the renewal of life expired assets, improved track geometry using modern materials for improved resilience, and the opportunity to remove clogged ballast and wet beds.

As in any major engineering project, not everything went perfectly. A missing bearer had to be resupplied in a hurry, a bent switch blade had to be reset, and a damaged cable replaced. But these small problems gave engineers the opportunity to think on their feet and the end result was a completed project handed back on time.

Poupart’s junction and Courthill were just two of the Southern Region projects delivered over Christmas and the New Year. In total, SRSA,

28

working with a host of subcontractors, including Siemens Mobility, Lundy Projects, RCU Solutions, SRS Rail System International, Kents, Collis, Ash Construction Group and Ashby Electrical, successfully installed: 14 location cases One relocatable equipment building (REB) ne PSP (principal supply points – signalling O power) hree FSPs (functional supply points – T signalling power) 15 signals 38 axle counters 27 AWS (Automatic Warning Signal) sensors 2 6 TPWS (Train Protection and Warning System) sensors 40,500 metres of cable Six signalling gantries One cantilever Five signal posts One UTX (undertrack crossing) nd a number of cable route packages and A signage and signal bases.

railbusinessdaily.com

P o u p a r t ’s j u n c t i o n

Image: Network Rail

VIC3 is not the only phase of the programme that is currently under way. Alstom and VolkerFitzpatrick installed two brand new UTXs across the Holborn and Portsmouth lines adjacent to Peabody RRAP (road-rail access point), just outside Tulse Hill station, as part of Phase 4.

There were some big challenges to overcome. with surface-laid and buried services crossing the trenches, freezing temperatures, rain and changes of staff due to COVID. But, despite all the hurdles, the team managed to install both UTXs, in addition to completing cable trough installation, correlation and axle counter sighting, all within the possession, and handing the site back on time.

Moving on...

On 15 January, Network Rail awarded Alstom a contract for Phase 5, covering the complete resignalling of Stewarts Lane Interlocking and the targeted asset renewal, relock and recontrol of the Herne Hill interlocking back to Three Bridges ROC. The work doesn’t stop there. Next up on the £160 million Victoria resignalling programme is Clapham Ladder S&C stage 1 at Easter, with stage 2

railbusinessdaily.com

at Christmas 2022. The new signalling between London Victoria, Clapham Junction and Balham will be commissioned over the same access that Christmas. And elsewhere in Sussex, Copyhold junction near Haywards Heath will be rebuilt and track renewed at Burgess Hill, Preston Park and

29

in the Clayton tunnel. The work, which will take place over a nine-day blockade of the lines between Three Bridges and Brighton from Saturday 19 to Sunday 27 February, includes replacing eight sets of points at Copyhold along with over 8,000 tonnes of ballast and 1,500 metres of track.

Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Planning

Planning for success Many people see railway maintenance as being carried out by a small group of orange-clad figures working alongside the railway close to a parked Network Rail van, but there is a lot more to it than that

Meantime, questions are being asked by infrastructure managers, telephone calls are coming in from either angry or concerned train operators (or both!), and the pressure is on.

First may come the temporary fix – a clamped rail, a replaced signal, the broken wires dragged clear of the track and isolated so at least dieselpowered trains can run. Then planning can start on what needs to be done overnight, or over the next few nights, to make good the problem. Can it even be done overnight? Or will the railway need to be closed for an extended period to replace defective infrastructure?

Increasingly, whether due to global warming, or the increasing age of the infrastructure, or both, the problem may not even be due to the railway itself. Blown-over trees, mudslides, floods and even hot weather can close the railway, and then it’s down to the maintenance teams to get it back open.

January 2022

Warrington Bank Quay

It’s a thankless task. While the railway is shut, management is in regular contact, television news teams gather to see why the trains aren’t running and disgruntled passengers are making their comments known – not to mention the ‘experts’ that always seem to come out of the woodwork at times of crisis. Then, after sleepless nights and hard work, when the railway is open, the pressure goes away – until next time.

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After sleepless nights and hard work, when the railway is open, the pressure goes away – until next time

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Under pressure

Photo: Network Rail

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ailway maintenance is a complex business. It covers a multitude of skills and technologies, requires either a great deal of planning or almost none at all, and has two main aims – to keep the railway running, and to keep everyone safe while doing so.

On a day-to-day basis, one important role is that of reactive maintenance. A broken rail, a defective signal, a mile of overhead electrification cable pulled down by a train – they all need immediate attention.

There is no time to plan, apart from perhaps a quick look at some reference drawings. The imperative is to get the railway back open, even if only temporarily. So, the maintenance teams head off to site to see what needs fixing.

Perhaps saying there is no planning is being a bit harsh. The planning for generic failures can, of course, be carried out in advance. Spare parts for regular mishaps can be held in stock locally, and the team trained how to install them quickly and safely. But no two failures are the same, and their locations can cause extra difficulties. How accessible is the site? What other hazards are there in the vicinity? Did the failure of one asset damage another?

Much of this work is carried out by the railway’s in-house maintainers. Depending on the particular incident, machinery may need to be brought in from outside suppliers, along with specialist labour. In particularly challenging times – extensive storm damage, widespread flooding or even a heatwave buckling track all over the region and causing overhead wires to sag – it may well be a case of all hands to the pump, with teams of maintainers bused from other parts of the country. Reactive maintenance is a high-pressure business.

Sitting back from the heady pace of emergency repairs, the planners do their best to reduce the

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maintainers’ workload. Ideally, assets should be replaced or repaired before they wear out. This is an ideal situation, and if it can become reality then scrambling the repair teams to attend to an urgent failure will become a thing of the past.

But this requires an intimate knowledge of the state of repair of every single item on the railway network. That’s an immense task.

Network Rail, the UK’s largest, but not only, railway infrastructure owner, declares that it has 20,000 miles of track – a number that takes some understanding. It can be broken down into: 40,000 miles (65,000 km) of steel rail 01,850 lengths of rail (based on 108 metre 6 rails) 9.2 million sleepers (based on 650mm 4 spacing) 196.8 million rail clips (four per sleeper) 2 20 million tonnes of ballast (11,000 tonnes per mile) Who knows the condition of every one of those?

In addition, Network Rail has 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts (count the bricks!) and an enormous number of signal posts and gantries, overhead electrification portals and masts, lineside cabinets, cables (guess at six cables alongside each track – that’s 120,000 miles) and cable ducts (one per metre = 20 million individual troughs and lids, though not all lines are troughed).

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The numbers are simply enormous.

And don’t forget the 2,500 stations. Oh, and the 190,000 earthworks assets comprising 70,000 soil cuttings, 20,000 rock cuttings and 100,000 embankments, the majority of which are over 100 years old. Keeping track of all of the above was simply impossible before the days of computers and databases. It’s therefore not surprising that, from time to time, an embankment would slide, or a signal lamp go out, or a rail fastening break, and not even be noticed for some time.

The only way to check was to go out on track and look. Structures examiners and inspectors had to check every bridge and tunnel every five years, gangs of track workers had to literally walk the line, and, as one can’t see all the fasteners from any one side of the track, that means people walking both sides, doubling the risk, since these inspections weren’t always carried out when trains weren’t running (at night when the visibility is bad).

Geotechnical engineers had to take soil samples and carry out other tests, not only on the slopes but right under the track itself. Surveyors checked the location of every element of the railway – the permanent structures, temporary ones and even the actual position of the track. Once their condition was known, plans could be made to maintain those that needed it. Anything untoward could be scheduled as a priority, earthworks and other structures that seemed to be in trouble could be monitored by attaching automatic surveying equipment to them that would instantly report any signs of movement. Such intimate knowledge of the railway was, of course, impossible, and it wasn’t surprising that faults were sometimes overlooked and incidents occurred, meaning the rapid-response team was still required.

Hi-tech to the rescue Now, in the 21st century, technology has come along to make cataloguing all of these assets and their condition easier. It also keeps ‘boots off the ballast’ by removing the need for manual inspections.

Photo: Network Rail

Planning

Colchester

Surveying equipment such as Fugro’s RILA system can be mounted directly onto a railway locomotive or train to measure track and rail corridors without interrupting scheduled services and while avoiding the need for personnel to be on or near the track.

The RILA system utilises a combination of integrated laser, imaging and positioning sensors to measure absolute track position and the relationship between the track and surrounding assets. Housed in a single, self-contained carbonfibre box, the combination of this equipment allows holistic data for the rail corridor to be collected at normal line speed.

The result is an accurate three-dimensional model of all the objects in and around the track.

Outputs from the system can be used for a variety of applications, from creating millimetre-accurate inventories of the location of assets to help power predictive asset management, to providing detailed information that will enable on-the-fly engineering fixes. With the data being cloud based and accessible via the internet, field teams can quickly understand how the infrastructure was configured prior to the failure and what needs to be done to return it to service.

As well as mounting equipment such as RILA to service trains, Network Rail has a number of

dedicated inspection trains, the most advanced of which is the New Measurement Train. This is a converted High Speed Train (two Class 43 power cars and five or six Mk3 carriages) fitted with cameras and sensors that inspect, amongst other things, track gauge, alignment, twist and cant. It is also fitted with a pantograph, even though it is a diesel-powered train, and uses this plus bright lights and powerful cameras to check overhead line height and stagger as well as cable condition.

Mounted underneath the New Measurement Train, as well as four other trains in Network Rail’s inspection fleet, are Plain Line Pattern Recognition (PLPR) cameras. These capture an image every 0.8mm, taking 70,000 images a second at the top speed of 125mph and sending them back to the inspection team in Derby. Information on confirmed defects, such as missing fasteners, excess ballast and ineffective rail clamps, can then be sent to local track section managers, enabling engineers to target track maintenance more effectively.

The view from above Another new technology brought in to assist with the railway’s need to gather asset information is the use of UAVs - unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.

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Planning

along the way, so their use will continue for the foreseeable future. They can also carry much larger payloads, high-resolution and thermalimaging cameras, and even be used to deliver materials to inaccessible hilltops.

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Network Rail worked with biodiversity experts using satellites to survey the whole of its estate – a combined area of 52,000 hectares

Even satellites have been called upon to help with railway surveys. Network Rail worked with biodiversity experts using satellites to survey the whole of its estate – a combined area of 52,000 hectares, approximately one and a half times the size of the Isle of Wight. Over six million trees grow on its land, and these surveys are being used to identify individual species, estimate their age and even their condition, with the intention of giving advanced notice of any that might pose a risk to the railway.

Photo: Network Rail

Plowman Craven has developed the Vogel R3D drone, which the company claims is able to cover even the busiest and most inaccessible areas of the rail network from a working height of 25 metres.

It can capture track condition and measurement data from a position of safety even during traffic hours, making it perfect for track alignment and topographical surveys.

Chris Preston, a former president of the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors and Network Rail senior survey engineer, said that the development of this drone technology was “a real game-changer for Network Rail”, helping the infrastructure owner to satisfy many of its survey requirements in a safe manner without the cost implications or potential programme delays associated with multiple possessions.

Helicopters still have their uses though.

Drones have to operate within line of sight of their controller, although trials are underway to extend this, and are constrained by the life of their batteries. Helicopters can work for an extended period and can fly along the railway for miles at a time, inspecting fence lines and multiple assets

Birmingham New Street

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Rise of the drones

Dawlish

January 2022

Photo: Network Rail

Drones have been used on the railway for a number of years, usually as photographic platforms. Able to carry cameras high over the infrastructure, they have now largely replaced helicopters for that sort of work.

As drone technology has improved, they can carry heavier payloads and more instrumentation, so they have been adopted by surveying companies to not only carry out visual inspections of areas such as underneath viaduct arches, but they can also carry LiDAR equipment and make point-cloud surveys or the railway and its surroundings.

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Network Rail is incorporating these technologies, and the data they can produce, into its Intelligent Infrastructure programme. The aim is to use the data being gathered to enable predictive maintenance, identifying potential trouble days, weeks and even months before it manifests itself.

This insight will give maintenance teams time to plan their work when it is least disruptive, the ability to group tasks to make the best use of their time and resources on site, and visibility of degradation rates and access to maintenance history for railway assets. As a result, they will become better at fixing the network before it breaks by using data to predict failures and become proactive instead of just reacting after things have gone wrong.

Planning the work However the data is captured and analysed, the actual maintenance work has to be planned.

Whereas the reactive teams have to do this ‘on the hoof’, the regular maintenance and renewals planning process can take a while, particularly for work to be carried out during one of the bank holiday weekends, when the longer jobs can be undertaken.

Although some work can be carried out while the railway is ‘live’, known as open line or ‘red zone’ working, the vast majority takes place when the railway is closed to trains, either locally (a ‘green’ zone) or a full blockade.

If it is a small, localised job, the work may be carried out at night or while trains are temporarily held by red signals. However, a number of maintenance and renewals projects need more than the five or six hours overnight to complete.

Shutting the line means that the train operators have to be consulted and offered diversionary routes or rail-replacement buses to keep their passengers moving.

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Planning

Pre-appointments If a principal contractor is to be appointed, will it be against a framework contract? Or an open tender? Current practice is to have framework contractors pre-appointed. They still have to bid for it, and have their bids accepted, but the procurement process is not only streamlined, it is a lot more cost effective. For example, imagine a major piece of renewals work that has to go out to tender. Network Rail has to understand what work is needed, and what the likely cost will be, so it has to have the current state of the railway accurately surveyed to give it a benchmark.

In turn, the four tenderers have to understand the current condition of the railway so they know how much work is needed. Network Rail will not guarantee the accuracy of its own survey, which would mean it having to accept the financial risk if there should be an error, so all four bidders have to have their own surveys done. Nice work for the surveyors, but an expensive exercise for those paying the bills.

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The cost of preparing a tender can then easily run into seven figures for a big job

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Incidentally, while keeping the passengers on the train would seem the obvious best solution – their journey may take half an hour longer, but many won’t mind and they won’t have to disembark and then reboard another train later in their journey – in the past, it has not always been the chosen solution.

There had been instances of train operators rejecting the offered diversionary route and insisting on using buses, forcing passengers to leave the train and board a bus, then leave the bus and board wanother train.

The reason for this seemingly irrational behaviour? Government grants were available to help fund the bus service. Transport Minister Norman Baker clamped down on that one in 2013, but there have been anecdotal reports of the practice continuing beyond that date.

With the passengers taken care of, the work itself has to be planned. What resources are needed? Machinery? Materials? Contingent labour?

The cost of preparing a tender can then easily run into seven figures for a big job. The winner will get that back in the contract fee, while the three losers will attempt to recoup those costs off their next job, meaning that the railway eventually funds all of it. With a framework, at least only two surveys are needed and one bid paid for – a substantial saving.

Wider context As access to the railway is hard to come by, the opportunity presented by a blockade must be maximised. Planners will need to contact their opposite numbers on other teams. While track is being replaced, vegetation can be cut back, under-track cable crossings replaced, bridge brickwork repaired, drainage and culverts cleared, signal posts repainted, level crossing

surfaces renewed and a host of other tasks undertaken – often several miles from the original work site, depending on how long the blockaded section is or can be. Some inspection work can be carried out too – track lifted on bridges to look underneath, for example.

Materials need to be ordered. Some will be relatively simple stock items – rail, sleepers, clips, ballast – but switched diamond crossings are long lead time items, as are interfaces with obsolete signalling systems and waybeams on bridges.

All this may sound complicated for a single blockade. Now multiply it up to cover 1,900 possessions and 4,000 worksites, as happens at Christmas. How many items of plant will be needed? Are there even that many road-rail excavators available in the country?

Probably around 20,000 men and women will be needed over the holiday – and that’s only allowing for five at each worksite. Are 20,000 people willing to give up their time over Christmas? And how many or them are qualified site managers, rail welders, cable splicers, tracklayers, signal testers? A major delay a few years ago was caused by engineering train drivers running out of hours in the middle of the possession due to programme rescheduling, so no ballast could be delivered.

This is why planning can take two years, why work over Christmas and New Year can cost over £130 million to deliver, and why, if a job goes wrong, or is delayed by bad weather, it can take a year or two to reassemble the team and finish the job. Over the last Christmas and New Year, 1,968 possessions out of 1,985 were handed back on time or early – 99.1 per cent.

Now that’s good planning.

Photo: Network Rail

Gidea Park

January 2022

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High-speed rail signalling maintenance Railways depend on an effective signalling system – its functionality and reliability are critical to ensure the safe operation of the network

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Images: Xrail

iven their complexity, signalling systems take up a large part of the railway’s preventative and corrective maintenance requirement.

High-speed railways, defined as those operating at speeds higher than 155mph (250km/h), have particular challenges and, as a result, usually adopt an in-cab signalling system.

This, in turn, requires them to either have a highly skilled signalling maintenance department of their own or to contract with an experienced, hi-tech company that can optimise performance in all phases of a signalling system’s life cycle.

One British company, Xrail Group, is a global market leader in the design and implementation of rail signalling inspection and maintenance processes. With extensive ETCS Level 4 signalling systems experience, it collaborates with customers and stakeholders to provide a better passenger service.

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We are demonstrating and proving our capabilities in the international market

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Currently, the company holds contracts to provide corrective and preventative maintenance services for Spain’s Madrid-Levante high-speed line and for the Saudi Arabian Haramain highspeed railway’s signalling systems and technical buildings. Xrail Group is providing both railways with 24/7, 365 days-a-year support and service by teams based at a number of maintenance centres along the lines.

“We are demonstrating and proving our capabilities in the international market, including our expertise in maintaining high-speed systems

and associated assets,” said Munir Patel, Xrail Group founder and CEO.

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“As an agile SME, we make it our business to understand each client’s unique requirements to enable our team to optimise preventative and predictive maintenance regimes and create cost savings where possible.”

In addition to offering safe and cost-effective solutions, Xrail Group has a proven capability of swift mobilisation. The company’s most recent project was deployed in just eight days over the Christmas period.

Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Rail Plant

Powering tomorrow’s plant

Image: Network Rail

As the rail industry moves towards its net zero carbon goal, will the plant hire industry help, or even keep up?

Queen’s Road, Manchester

January 2022

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Our vision is to have all our plant powered by electricity or hydrogen by 2030

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he announcement by civil engineering contractor Laing O’Rourke on 31 January 2022 that it will replace red diesel with hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) in all its plant equipment before the end of March came as no real surprise. The drive to reduce emissions and make construction sites ‘greener’ has been under way for some time.

Quoting the results of tests by specialist plant businesses Select Plant Hire and Explore Plant and Equipment, Laing O’Rourke anticipates that the move will reduce ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions from its plant operations – excavators, cranes, piling rigs, dumper trucks and generators – by up to 90 per cent. Currently, the use of red diesel in plant equipment is the largest single source of the company’s direct emissions, comprising 39 per cent of the total.

Laing O’Rourke regards HVO as a ‘transition fuel’ as it works towards a plant fleet that is entirely made up of electric and hydrogenpowered equipment. “Our vision is to have all our plant powered by electricity or hydrogen by 2030,” explained Alex Warrington, managing director of Select Plant Hire. “This is not possible right now, but, from 2025, we expect to see a marked increase in the availability of electric and hydrogen plant equipment from manufacturers,

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and from then we will start to replace the HVO powered plant in our fleet.”

The company will also ensure that any thirdparty plant equipment used on its project sites uses HVO rather than diesel.

Although a significant move in terms of construction, where does that leave the rail plant industry?

The answer is – with a major problem.

Construction vs rail Although there are a number of similarities between construction plant and rail plant, there are also significant differences.

Construction plant is worked hard. The machines work at least a couple of shifts a day every day and may be replaced every four years or so because by then they are worn out.

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Trent Valley line

Diesel engines used in road-rail plant are covered by the regulations for non-road mobile machinery (NRMM), a harmonised system that covers both the European emission standards and those of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

The same regulations also cover dieselpowered trains and locomotives as well as canal

King’s Cross

January 2022

boats and any other non-road device that is capable of self-propulsion.

The emissions standards have gradually been tightened. The initial Stage I regulations were implemented in 1999, followed by Stage II (2001), Stage III, split into Stage IIIA and Stage IIIB, between 2006 and 2013. Stage IV came into force in 2014 and Stage V in 2021.

Image: Network Rail

Rail plant – the machines that run on railway tracks as well as on roads and on building sites – are not worked so heavily. Track access is limited, so a machine may only work at weekends, or one or two night shifts a week. In addition, with the railway track being just one long narrow ‘road’, it is often difficult to have more than one machine on site at any one time.

For that reason, rail plant has to be more versatile. A standard excavator can act as a crane and can also be fitted with a range of attachments so it can lift poles, drive piles, cut down trees and undertake other specialist tasks.

It also has to be fitted with rail wheels and often a separate braking system, a conversion that can be quite expensive.

For these reasons, rail plant, or construction plant with road-rail conversions, costs more than conventional equipment, is less heavily used, and therefore lasts longer. Equipment is certified for use on the railway for a seven-year period. After this, the machine has to be re-inspected to make sure it meets current regulations, and can be recertified for another seven years.

Most plant-hire companies therefore reckon on a 14-year life for their plant – a few extend it to 21 years. Which is why the current drive for a ‘greener’ future is causing concern. To what standard should new plant be purchased? What will emissions regulations look like in 14 or even 21 years’ time?

Image: Network Rail

Rail Plant

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Rail Plant

Image: NAP Webb

These standards cover engines running on conventional, fossil-fuel diesel – in the UK, off-road plant has run on ‘red diesel’ with lower tax, although this is about to change. Currently, new plant has to be purchased to Stage V. Companies such as Liebherr, which sell complete road-rail excavators, already offer them to this standard and there are dispensations to still allow Stage IV, depending on when the engine was actually manufactured.

Reuse of older equipment

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Unlike conventional mineral diesel, HVO is naturally free from sulphur and aromatic content

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There are also ways of upgrading older equipment.

HS2 recently conducted a six-month trial with exhaust manufacturer Eminox, which retrofitted a Balfour Beatty piling rig, fitted with a Stage IIIA diesel engine, and brought it up to the Stage V emissions standard. This new technology removes particulates, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide emissions using new airless dosing technology. It is the first of its kind and the innovative technology will also benefit users of NRMM working in clean air zones such as Greater London and Birmingham.

The Eminox solution is for use on conventional diesel engines. The other answer is to change the fuel, substituting diesel obtained from crude oil with synthetic alternatives.

Conventional biodiesels are produced by the transesterification of vegetable oil to produce FAME (fatty acid methyl esters). HVO, on the other hand, is produced by adding hydrogen to vegetable oil to produce a paraffinic hydrocarbon that is free

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of oxygen – unlike FAME, which consequently has a limited shelf life and is prone to contamination.

The manufacturing process, however, is fairly energy intensive and uses hydrogen that is currently produced from natural gas.

Unlike conventional mineral diesel, HVO is naturally free from sulphur and aromatic content, and it also has a higher calorific value.

It is produced from renewable waste materials including animal fat, waste from the food industry, recycled cooking oil, waste from the fish industry and residues from food oil production.

info@snic-rail.co.uk 41

snic-rail.co.uk Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Currently, the situation regarding fuel for plant is quite complex. There are two ‘colours’ of diesel fuel – red and white. White diesel, which has no artificial colouring, is used in road vehicles and carries full duty of 57.95 pence per litre. Red diesel is marked with a red dye to prevent fraud and carries a rebated duty of 11.14 pence per litre.

According to HM Revenue and Customs, red diesel is used mainly for off-road purposes, such as to power bulldozers and cranes used in the construction industry, or to power drills for oil extraction.

It accounts for around 15 per cent of all the

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Gas To Liquid gives better cold-start performance and is also much easier to clean up after a spill as it is biodegradable

diesel used in the UK and is responsible for the production of nearly 14 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. Red diesel used in the construction and infrastructure building sectors was also estimated to have caused seven per cent of nitrogen oxide emissions and eight per cent of PM10 emissions (a type of particulate matter) in London in 2018.

Doosan 270 UHL Long Reach

January 2022

To help reduce emissions and pollution, and to encourage users to move away from diesel as a fuel, the government announced, as part of its 2020 budget, that it would remove entitlement to use red diesel from most sectors, except for agriculture (as well as horticulture, forestry and fish farming), rail and non-commercial heating, from 1 April 2022.

It was later clarified that road-rail plant – fitted with flanged wheels and running on railway tracks – will continue to be allowed to use red diesel.

However, rubber-tyred and tracked vehicles, which aren’t fitted with flanged wheels but do work on the same sites, will need to be switched to white diesel. Large sites will therefore, from 1 April, need to have two fuel bowsers, one with red diesel for road-rail vehicles and another, with white diesel, for non-rail plant.

Image: Readypower

Red diesel and white HVO

Euston resignalling

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These are all classified as residual products and waste and are guaranteed sustainable.

The switch to HVO can be carried out with little or no modification needed to the engine and its ancillaries, and it has a marked effect on emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by 80-90 per cent, the fuel contains almost no sulphur, and its burning characteristics reduce carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbon emissions, particularly when used in older engines (Stage IIIB and earlier).

There is another alternative fuel available – GTL (Gas To Liquid). This is the synthetic diesel alternative that is produced by turning natural gas into a liquid fuel suitable for use in unmodified diesel engines. Carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by about 10 per cent and using GTL also helps reduce emissions such as nitrogen oxides (up to 25 per cent reduction) and particulate matter (soot – reduced by up to 38 per cent).

GTL gives better cold-start performance and is also much easier to clean up after a spill as it is biodegradable.

Image: Network Rail

Rail Plant

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Image: Network Rail

Rail Plant

King’s Cross

As this initiative was, in the government’s words, “to help meet its climate change and air quality targets”, the obvious solution would be for non-rail construction plant to be moved over to HVO fuel and reduce emissions that way. Then operators would have to buy ‘red’ HVO, which is inherently costlier but carries the reduced level of

Typical fuel costs Red diesel White diesel Red HVO White HVO

£ 0.83 per litre £ 1.30 per litre £ 1.20 per litre £ 1.60 per litre

Prices supplied by a leading fuel wholesaler based on deliveries of 1,000 litres in 2 Feb 2022.

tax, and the government would be another step closer to achieving its emissions goals.

However, nothing is that simple. If non-rail plant is switched over to HVO, and therefore emits far fewer emissions, the operator still has to use white HVO, which is 30p/litre more than conventional white diesel. So, in seeking to reduce emissions this way, the government has actually ensured that there is a disincentive for operators to use low-emission HVO. This doesn’t make sense from an environmental point of view, but makes perfect sense if, as a major plant operator told Inside Track, “this is nothing to do with emissions – it is just a money grab by the Treasury”.

Indeed, the HMRC website boasts that the

Treasury will gain £1.405 billion of extra tax from this move in 2022-23.

What next?

Despite the obvious advantages of changing fuels, as Laing O’Rourke said in its announcement, HVO is regarded as a ‘transition fuel’. By 2030, it expects its plant to be powered by batteries or hydrogen.

But that then raises its own questions. For a machine bought in 2022, what will battery technology look like in 2029, 2036 or even 2043?

How long will it be before hydrogen fuel is readily available? And how much more advanced will hydrogen fuel cells be in seven, 14 or 21 years?

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Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Rail Plant

To understand the industry’s thinking on these questions, Inside Track approached a number of those involved in the rail plant industry to hear their views.

With HS2 still in the initial construction phase, and therefore not using road-rail plant, the biggest ‘game in town’ is still Network Rail, which uses plant from a variety of hire companies and contractors on a daily basis.

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Battery technology is changing all the time and is improving greatly, it’s still not at the level where it’s going to provide adequate power to drive a machine for 24/48 hours

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would like them to, then we’re going to suffer as a result further on down the line.

“I know the OEMs are working on it. JCB has

developed a hydrogen-powered telehandler, I’m sure they’re looking at moving onto other product lines as well.

“Battery power might be appropriate for mobile elevating work platforms, and we do have a few that are battery powered, but, when you get to the likes of excavators and cranes, you’re not going to have the power from the battery source to provide sufficient energy, so there will have to be alternatives.

“Although battery technology is changing all the time and is improving greatly, it’s still not at the level where it’s going to provide adequate power to drive a machine for 24/48 hours. We’re a long way from that.

Image: AP Webb

Until his recent retirement, Malcom Miles was professional head of plant at Network Rail. What did he think about low-emission and electric plant?

“We’re going to start addressing this as part of the CP7 plans,” he said, “as we have to be conscious of the 2040 deadline. If you look at machines having a 15-year life, really you are looking at machines that you are procuring from 2025 onwards, which isn’t that far off.

“Up to now, Network Rail has focused on traction in its decarbonisation strategy. The focus has been very much around trains, as that’s where our biggest utilisation is. But all the way through the process I’ve been saying ‘don’t forget plant’.

“We have to be mindful of the impact that’s going to have on the supply chain. We’re totally reliant on the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) moving in that direction. We can’t build RRVs from scratch. We just take a conventional construction machine and convert it to work on the railway. So, if the OEM zone isn’t moving in that space at the sort of speed that we

Image: Aquarius

Expert opinion

January 2022

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Rail Plant

Plant hire So, the concern is the lack of certainty. If there was a known changeover date after which stricter emission controls would apply, then plant suppliers could plan for that. However, the dilemma is that, if they change over to Stage V engines now and restrictions don’t come in, they will be priced out of the competition against others still with old Stage II machinery. However, if they don’t upgrade now, they may get stuck with out-of-date and unusable plant if restrictions do come in.

January 2022

Image: Network Rail

“Hydrogen is not without its difficulties.

It’s relatively safe as a power source – hydrogen-powered engines are fine. The biggest problem is how do you store it? Where?

It’s those issues that that need to be thought through. One of Network Rail’s people is on a European Standards Committee which is looking at that at the moment. But, even then, it likely to be the end of 2022 before they have produced anything.”

As Network Rail’s track programme director, Steve Featherstone was heavily involved in the road-rail plant sector. Now an independent consultant, he is still passionate about the subject.

“Over the years, plant-hire companies have got fairly used to making investment decisions,” he said. “They spend, in round terms, £350,000 on a new RRV and they expect it to earn its living over 14 years – two seven-year cycles.

“At seven years, the machine has its mid-life upgrade to bring it up to the latest standards, which costs maybe between £50-£80,000 depending how hard a life it has had and how the standards have moved on.

“The challenge they have at the moment is trying to understand what their income stream is going to be for the next 14 years. They know what the costs are going to be, but they are really struggling to understand what the income stream is going to be. There’s so much uncertainty – uncertainty with standards.

“The plant suppliers are uncertain that, if a controlling mind in Network Rail says, from next year, they are only allowing Stage V engines, then A, the supply chain can’t cope, and B, the people with Stage V engines will be rubbing their hands and the people with Stage III engines will now have machines that they can’t put to work.

“The industry needs to get some clarity from its clients. If they came out and said they only want Stage V, then the industry needs to start buying Stage V. Everybody will know to start retiring the old and bringing in the new. But, right now, there are no signals.”

As for new technologies, what to go for? Brian Reynolds, CEO of plant-hire company TXM Plant, said: “TXM investigated the options for a more environmentally friendly and sustainable solution to diesel. We concluded that GTL was the most sustainable option as we had concerns over Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) with alternative fuels.

“We were very pleased to achieve reductions of Particulate Matter (PM) of up to 95 per cent for some of our fleet when we tested the GTL fuel across our range of machines.

“Our maiden project was the Dartmoor line at Okehampton, where we ran various RRV

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machines for over 1,000 shifts without any issue using GTL fuel, an initiative fully supported

by Network Rail. GTL Fuel use for TXM is a steppingstone toward Zero Carbon emission equipment.

“We have since committed the whole business to the gas-to-liquid fuel route for all our RRV equipment and we are making a significant impact with our carbon reduction plan.”

Bob Browning, head of corporate strategy at Quattro Plant, revealed that his company is looking at alternative fuels but could not currently see any clear solution. “We do have a company view on alternative fuels,” he said.

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Rail Plant

The converters GOS Engineering is the company that converts a lot of construction plant for use on rail, adding the flanged wheels and extra braking systems.

Neil Gregory believes that the future is probably electric, in some form.

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Image: Readypower

“But we’re not quite sure which is right to use.

We have doubts about some alternative fuels, and we are trying others. Vegetable oil is one we are using – we have got that in our sweepers. GTL is a totally different kettle of fish. If we stuck that in one of our old 150s, the engine would go bang!”

Several of the plant-hire companies expressed concern that their customers were not being consistent in their approach. There were reports of major infrastructure companies making public statements on the need for green technologies, to reduce emissions and look at alternative fuels. Yet, those same companies’ procurement teams were hiring the cheapest machines they could find on the market – 20 years old and with no discernible emissions controls. Companies that are investing in new machines therefore run the danger of pricing themselves out of a market that is, in reality, only paying lip service to the emissions challenge.

“How big is your crystal ball?” he joked, when asked. “I think it will be battery of some kind. But there are risks with the technology at present, and the level of risk that seems acceptable in cars, with technology developed over decades, would be totally unacceptable today with new batteries on rail.

“One of the issues with lithium-ion batteries is the control systems, and right now there’s a

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fair way to go. Electric machines still have diesel engines to get them out of trouble or recharge the batteries. Just to have a standalone battery, I still think that’s a stretch away really.

“We’ve created a battery unit with what we call our microgrid. That’ll work in the tunnels. But that’s being pulled by a loco – it’s just the equipment running on batteries. So, it’ll come.

Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Rail Plant

“But there are still some challenges yet.

Big plant has very limited hours in terms of what they can do. For example, with a normal digger on a construction site, if the battery runs out, you can recover it and recharge it offline. It’s a whole different ballgame on track or in a tunnel. I still think we’ll have recovery engines using diesel and various other things for a long time.”

“

Our road map is more to look first at how we reduce our own emissions, and then how we change as the infrastructure of the UK changes and moves towards an alternative fuel

“

Andy’s comments regarding small tools falls right into the range of Robel, a manufacturer that has been producing electric power tools for use on the railway for some time – particularly ones which use interchangeable power packs.

King’s Cross

January 2022

Tim Stafford from Plasser-UK looks after the Robel product range in the UK. “For the past two or three years, our developers in Germany have been working hard on developing battery technology, and we now have a number of approved railway products that we’re bringing to market, such as battery hand tampers, impact wrenches, rail saws, rail drilling and cutting machines and so on.

“This development takes a lot of time and costs money and obviously tends to put a little cost onto the end product and the products become a bit more expensive. However, people don’t always see the benefits! They don’t see the reduced maintenance cost due to the fact there no longer maintaining a combustion engine, they don’t see the fact that they’re not putting fuel in anymore.

Image: Network Rail

Andy Webb, managing director of plant hire company AP Webb and also of machine converter Rail-Ability, takes an opposing view, believing that batteries will never replace diesel for bigger, heavier machinery, although for small tools and light equipment it’s an ideal solution.

“For the bigger, heavier machines, I do believe hydrogen is the answer,” he said. “And I think Lord Bamford, who has his own hydrogen plant, is quietly pursuing that. We have a very close relationship with JCB and I think we would be in the forefront of understanding what is available and how we could adapt it. The beauty is, they’re not a dissimilar size or weight to a diesel engine, they may fit into existing machinery although the fuel tanks may need to be larger, so, as that technology is perfected, I think that will be the route.

“As for alternative fuels, my understanding is that the additives clean up older diesel engines, so they’re less polluting. I’m not sure that’s the case with the new engines, and I’m not sure of the OEMs’ opinion on it, on the longevity and the warranty of these machines.”

Image: AP Webb

A certain point of view

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Rail Plant

“Breakdown costs are less because they are no longer breaking pull-cord starters etc and they’re not putting the wrong fuel in. They’re not always seeing the benefits of low hand-arm vibration, low noise, low emissions.

“Also the people who hold the purse strings find it difficult to realise these values.”

So, that means I cannot eliminate that risk as yet.

“If I look at hydrogen, as an option to eliminate the risk in full, that’s just not going to happen for another 10 to 15 years, so that one’s out the window.

“So, with every good risk assessment, you then look at what you can mitigate, what you can reduce, what you can change. And, from the Aquarius point of view, we’ve identified that, by changing things, our carbon reduction or our offset strategy can be managed and we can achieve this.

“That’s a little bit harder when you’ve got an RRV fleet because you have a fitter’s van, and

Salisbury

January 2022

then you have a very, very large 400/500bhp low loader to deliver equipment to site that uses diesel, and then you have an RRV that uses diesel, and then you have to go back with your low loader and then pick the machine up and then take it back to the yard, or take it onto the next work site.

“So, the whole element of using that machine is a high-risk area because you’re using it more.

You’re not looking at reducing the risk.

“Part of the strategy that we’ve adopted against our alternative fuels is, where we can, we reduce the use or the type of activity that we undertake. For instance, we are able to move and transpose 30 and 60-foot sections of rail.

Image: Network Rail

Part-way between light, hand tools and heavy diesel-powered excavators lie road-going vehicles that have been converted for rail use – pick-up trucks, people carriers and the like. At the forefront of this market is Aquarius Railroad Technology.

“The way that we’ve looked at the alternative fuel scenario is that we’ve addressed it as a risk assessment,” managing director Scott Harrison explained. “And we’ve addressed the risk as being diesel, petrol, LPG, and that ultimately is the risk that we’re trying to deal with.

“With any risk assessment, you can eliminate the risk, so we could move straight onto a batterypowered Land Rover and, to be honest, I can go and place Land Rovers into a company within the UK that has a CE-approved battery powerpack and I can have them converted within eight weeks – and I could do that tomorrow. But we don’t have the charging infrastructure to charge them at the dry hire centres around Network Rail’s facilities.

Image: Robel

Risk assessment

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Rail Plant

“As long as we can pick them up in the cess or the six-foot and move them into the fourfoot, we can move and shift those with the Land Rovers or with the Isuzu D-Max pickups that we have. The actual emission specification of those vehicles is a lot less than that of an RRV fleet.

“Therefore, in our risk assessment process, our commitment to the industry is to provide options where we can allow people to do the tasks and reduce the amount of carbon that their process emits. So, our road map is more to look first at how we reduce our own emissions, and then how we change as the infrastructure of the UK changes and moves towards an alternative fuel.”

In summary, there seems to be a commitment for the railway, and the country, to move towards zero carbon, but no clear road map on how to do it.

There are no clear stage targets and no consensus on how the plant industry is going to achieve the overall goal, or even if it will.

Various fuel options are on the table, along with batteries and hydrogen, but none of these seem to be a clear favourite. And the industry is being asked to fund development itself, to take

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Image: Andover Trailers

A muddle?

commercial risk, while some principals are still procuring on the basis of cost and so favouring those who are not taking part in this process.

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In short, it all seems to be a bit of a muddle with no clear guidance from government or infrastructure owners.

Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Signalling Assets

The challenge of signalling maintenance

Image: Network Rail

Signalling is perhaps the most complex and safety critical system on the railway, resulting a maintenance challenge that is equally complex

Example of signals that are being replaced – Macclesfield

R

ailway signalling is unusual in terms of railway engineering in that the technology in use today spans over 170 years. Only bridges and other structures have a similar timespan, but these tend to be fairly conventional designs where the challenges of ongoing maintenance and replacement are relatively straightforward.

For signalling, the technology embraces mechanical, electro-mechanical, electronic and digital systems. All of these disparate systems need to be maintained, and this clearly leads to various specialisms, none of which are easy and each have problems that have to be mastered if the railway is to run reliably, efficiently and safely.

So where does it all begin?

in people’s minds but, in reality, not many of these remain in service today. As well as the things that people see, mechanical elements include lever frames and associated mechanical locking, signal wire runs and point rodding with their cranks and pulleys, level crossing gates and closing mechanisms, plus the structures and posts to support all of these.

Mechanical signalling

Alongside the purely mechanical elements are block instruments and bells, signal position indicators on the signal-box shelves, and the electrical connectivity to make it all work.

January 2022

Maintaining the remaining boxes on the main line is not as difficult as might be imagined

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This remains the traditional image of signalling as remembered by the general public. The pictures of old signal boxes and semaphore signals exist

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Originally, this would have been by overhead pole routes, but nowadays, copper cables are the norm.

To complicate maintenance, there is no standard design, many of the old railway companies invented and manufactured their own equipment as well as buying components from commercial signalling suppliers. With the gradual modernisation of signalling, and as mechanical systems were replaced, so spares have been assembled and kept for use elsewhere.

Knowledge bank The heritage sector has built up mechanical skills, since the majority of lines stick to this technology, with many of the volunteer technicians having had careers in British Rail or elsewhere.

Strangely, maintaining the remaining boxes on the main line is not as difficult as might be imagined.

Spares can be a problem but ‘mechanical things’ can be seen and there will always be someone out there prepared to make a component part.

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Signalling Assets

The design and alteration of mechanical locking is the biggest challenge, where the experts are becoming a scarce resource. That said, a few people are learning the rudiments so that this very specialised skill can be retained.

Electro-mechanical signalling Pure mechanical signalling had its limitations and, with the growing knowledge of electricity in the second half of the 19th century, electrically powered elements entered the signalling arena.

The key component was the relay (in effect a switch operated by an electric current). The first application of relays was to enable improvements to safety within the area of a local signal box.

Another important element was the invention of the track circuit, a device used to establish the location of trains on a stretch of line.

Thousands of these exist today and they are a key component in ensuring that trains do not conflict with one another.

Initially, relays were bought off-the-shelf and were somewhat bulky devices requiring considerable space, which led to the construction of relay rooms. Many types or relay were developed, with different arrangements of coils and contact arms and with external terminals that required physical intervention if the relay had to be changed.

Saxmundham

Although now in the minority, there are still plenty of shelf-type relays in existence. To ease maintenance (and for use in new projects), plug-in relays were developed that are terminal pin coded to ensure any replacement is the right one for the application.

As relay understanding developed, so the

design of electrical interlockings emerged. These were capable of safely signalling a local area without the need for lever frames, although the earlier designs continued to use miniature lever frames to replicate the previous understanding as to how trains should be signalled.

Ely, Cambridgeshire

January 2022

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Signalling Assets

Accompanying relays were circuit controllers that rotated as a lever was pulled over so that the position of the lever could be integrated into the relay circuitry. Relay logic became part of the design training with the use of ‘control tables’ that gave a steer to designers as to the circuitry required. Tens of thousands of plug-in relays still exist and, indeed, relay technology was the backbone of signalling safety until the latter part of the 20th century.

Relays need servicing from time to time to ensure that the electrical contacts remain within specification and to minimise the chance of wrong-side failures occurring. This servicing can be undertaken either in railway workshops or by sending them away to a signalling supplier. Great care must be taken to ensure that the correct replacement is used and that the signalling functions are tested once the circuitry is restored.

This requires a level of skill that has to be proven.

Although now reducing in number, relay interlockings are still available for purchase by both main line and heritage railways. Such is the skill level of the latter that new interlockings have been designed and built in-house, the Swanage Railway being one example.

Wire degradation In a relay interlocking, there are hundreds of wires that connect the relay coils and contacts both to each other and to terminal blocks that link the interlocking instructions to the external signals, points and other external devices. These wires are insulated by a rubberised, co-polymer or PVC material for which the chemical composition has been modified, not always for the best, over the years.

Kingscote SB (Bluebell Railway) showing Main and Disc signals

The material used during the 1970/80s has been found to degrade over time. This does not cause a problem providing the wires are not disturbed, but, if wiring alterations are needed because of a track layout change, then there is a considerable risk of the insulation peeling off, with the possibility of wires coming into contact with each other and causing a wrong-side failure.

Maintenance technicians are well aware of this risk and avoid doing anything that might disturb the wires. If a major alteration is required, so all

Terminology explained A right-side failure is one that causes a piece of equipment to cease functioning without compromising the safety of trains.

A wrong-side failure occurs when equipment or a system fails in an unsafe condition, one which could lead to an accident.

of the wiring would need replacing, it is normal practice to replace the whole interlocking with a modern computer-based system.

Electronics and computers As commercial electronics developed in the industrial and domestic markets, so the technology entered the signalling profession.

As with the introduction of anything new on the railway, there was a deep-seated wariness among signal engineers of the day, so early systems were confined to non-safety applications.

Foremost were the multiplex links from the new power boxes of the late 1950s and 1960s out to the remote relay rooms to control the interlockings at those locations.

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Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Signalling Assets

Entering the digital age It is all too easy with all the current hype about digital technology to think that this is something new. Many applications are, but digital systems have actually been in use on the railway since the mid-1960s, with signalling beginning to adopt it in the early 1980s to distribute the latest train describer information out to remote locations using digital links and VDU screens. This gave many more people (principally operators and station staff) the ability to have an online view of where trains were.

ETCS panel at Machynlleth

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The end goal is to do away with lineside signals, replacing them with ‘Movement Authorities’ shown to drivers via the in-cab display

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The adoption of cathode-ray tube, traindescriber displays in the large mimic panels, showing the whereabouts of all trains within much larger control areas, was another use of electronics.

Most of this technology has now been replaced but a few early power boxes are still in use (Plymouth being the oldest). The problem of getting spares and the increasing unreliability of the electronics make for increasing ingenuity by the local maintenance teams to keep the equipment in operation.

Computers were even more distrusted for safety applications, but these were deployed for the control of train describers in the 1970s and 1980s. By today’s standards, the computing power was miniscule and they have since been replaced by more modern systems, accompanied by the introduction of LED units for the train describer displays.

Although technicians quickly got to grips with these new systems, their introduction meant that the traditional life of signalling equipment being typically 40 years was coming to an end.

The increasing use of commercial off-the-shelf hardware that becomes obsolete in less than 10 years meant that signalling systems had to adapt to the replacement of hardware (if not software) much more frequently than hitherto.

Despite the distrust, it was inevitable that computer technology would eventually be used for safety-critical functions in signalling. Britain led the way and, via a tripartite arrangement of British Rail, GEC and Westinghouse, a solid state interlocking (SSI) was developed and first deployed at Leamington Spa in 1985.

The traditional approach to fail-safe circuitry was no longer possible, so the concept of three computers acting in unison with ‘2 out of 3’ agreements for a correct instruction to be given became the accepted norm. Much time was spent

Network Rail’s training centre at Warrington

January 2022

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in developing the system to prove its integrity and the methods by which such interlockings could be tested, but this early initiative paved the way for many more SSI installations around the country.

The restrictions of the tripartite agreement meant a monopoly of supply from either GEC (now Alstom) and Westinghouse (now part of Siemens), which caused some disquiet. As the technology evolved, so other suppliers developed SSI systems, which included Alstom and Siemens upgrading the design to produce their own branded products.

Improved testing All of this has demanded a new method of testing, faulting and maintaining the systems, including different levels of staff ability. Technical support teams are now in place to assist the local technicians should problems occur, as well as having third-line support from the manufacturers on call. The SSI computers generate records of every instruction and transaction that takes place, but trained people are needed to interpret these outputs and analyse any problems.

Coupled with the safety elements, modern technology has enabled the big mimic displays in signalling centres, which were always difficult to modify if track layouts were altered, to be replaced by VDU screens, of which several make up a signaller’s workstation. So emerged the Integrated Electronic Control Centre which, with the addition of people responsible for route optimisation, train running and distribution of information to other places, replaced and enhanced the power box concept of the 1960s.

The distribution of SSI instructions out to the trackside also required a rethink, leading to the development of bespoke digital links to local distribution terminals from which the connection to signals and points is made via copper cables.

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Signalling Assets

All of this requires the maintenance workforce to have an understanding of the architecture of the system and to have first-line knowledge of what to do when things go wrong. Often, faults are rectified by change out of the faulty unit, requiring a repair and return service to be provided either by an in-house workshop or by the original manufacturer SSI, along with its modern-day developments, is now the accepted technology for conventional signalling upgrades and renewals. Point operation is either by a conventional point machine, of which there are different types, or by the latest development of an ‘in bearer’ clamp lock, where the operating mechanism is contained within a specially designed sleeper. Signal illuminations, which traditionally used filament bulbs that only had a finite life, are being replaced with LED displays that have much greater reliability.

ERTMS and ETCS Until recent times, signalling has included an element of infrastructure engineering. Only the train protection devices of AWS and TPWS have required equipment to be fitted on rolling stock, both of which come under the signalling maintenance regime except for train depots changing out faulty units.

The UK has been relatively slow to adopt ETCS, with only the Cambrian line, which was the location of the prototype trial, the centre section of Thameslink from London Bridge to beyond St Pancras, the Heathrow Airport link and the progressing project to equip the southern section of the East Coast main line, being fitted so far.

Movement Authorities

Relay room at Kingscote

With ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System) and its component part ETCS (European Train Control System), all this is changed and around 50 per cent of the signalling system is now train borne. This creates its own maintenance challenge, as not only does it introduce a whole load of new technology, but it also crosses a departmental divide.

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The end goal is to do away with lineside signals, replacing them with ‘Movement Authorities’ shown to drivers via the in-cab display. Only the Cambrian and the ongoing ECML project achieve this, the others retaining lineside signals in parallel.

A maintenance-themed article is not the place to describe the full technical detail or the benefits of ETCS but, in short, the system will yield capacity benefits as well as reducing the number of lineside components.

All rolling stock units operating over a section of line have to be fitted with ETCS equipment before signals can be removed, and this is a logistical challenge. While other train-borne systems exist, they are deployed on lines with captive stock, such as on London Underground and the HS1 high-speed link to the Channel Tunnel (Eurostar).

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Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Signalling Assets

Cables and connectivity No matter what signal technology is used in a particular area, connecting up the elements of a signalling system is a vital part of the operation.

Overhead pole routes are all but extinct, so cables located in lineside troughing are the principal means of achieving connectivity, but these have to be maintained and kept in good order.

Pure signalling cables use cores rather than pairs and are generally terminated in lineside cabinets, where they can be directly connected to signalling components, thus avoiding having

to make joints. Other cables for longer distance circuits and distribution of digital technology need to be jointed in between their termination points. Modern jointing techniques (usually by encasement in an epoxy resin) are relatively straightforward to implement but, should a cable develop low insulation, then the danger of cores coming into contact with one another means that cable replacement has to be carried out with a degree of urgency. Cable and route maintenance is thus another task for the signal engineer.

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A menace over many years has been cable theft, with thieves stealing signalling cables for their copper content

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So, what are the maintenance requirements?

The precise way forward is still being developed but, at the moment, the signal engineer remains the design authority with responsibility for maintaining the trackside infrastructure including the connecting radio links with the train depots being equipped to undertake testing of the on-board equipment and replacing any faulty unit, returning that to a centralised workshop for repair.

Bearing in mind that ETCS is designed as an interoperable system, the supplier of the train equipment might be different to the one who supplies the infrastructure components, including the equipment in the signalling centres, thus creating a mixture of different types that all need depots to be stocked up with spare units.

The interlockings and control of points continue to be controlled by SSI units as described previously. The ever-widening range of components means that technicians and associated support staff need to be organised into specialist groups for the different system areas that ETCS embraces.

With the ever-increasing size of the area controlled from a signalling centre, the need to ensure connectivity becomes much greater.

Further, a cable failure should not be capable of stopping trains from moving, so the concept of resilience is an important development.

Designing connectivity in a ring formation, so that a single cable cut does not stop the operation, is now policy. Traditional signalling circuits are not best suited to this concept, but the more modern systems controlled from a Railway Operating Centre (ROC), which are the successors to the IECC, are designed around digital transmission systems that are provided by other railway departments and even third-party communication networks.

Lever frame at Bridlington South SB

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Having to outsource the connectivity has come hard to many signal engineers, but the advantages far outweigh the traditional thinking. It does mean that, if problems occur, the signal engineer needs to liaise with the communication network centres for them to be resolved. An important factor is the design of the system so that safety is never compromised by a problem with the communications link.

A menace over many years has been cable theft, with thieves stealing signalling cables for their copper content. Such incidents can cause major disruption to train services and protection of cable routes, either by lid clamping or burial, has been carried out in hot spot areas.

With the advent of fibre optics and the gradual replacement of copper cables by aluminium, the menace has reduced, but the threat still exists and technicians have to be prepared for speedy action if a theft occurs.

Telecommunications and radio Telecoms has always been a major element of the signalling department. For years, there was always a friendly rivalry between the two disciplines, with each having their own technologies and associated engineers and technicians that remained largely separate in dayto-day activities.

In more recent times, the telecom networks have become a mainstay for signalling control distribution. In the UK, the decision to create Network Rail Telecom (NRT) has enabled the provision of a nationwide fibre-based digital transmission network (FTNx), acting as a ‘digital pipe’ for many applications including signalling, electrification control and many commercial systems.

The use of several high-capacity rings, supported by lower level rings with many ‘points of presence’, makes FTNx ideal for signalling system distribution. The engineers and technicians looking after these rings have to be well aware of the importance of the signalling functions being carried and to give priority to circuit restoration if train services are being disrupted. This requires close co-operation between the two disciplines and the associated development of trust.

Even more important is radio. This is used for communication between control centres and trains and is the second element of ERTMS, universally known as GSM-R. Developed in the mid-1990s, the system is used throughout the UK rail network and has spread throughout Europe and many other countries around the world.

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Signalling Assets

For a fully equipped ERTMS railway, the radio link is crucial since, if that fails, the trains will stop.

100 per cent radio coverage is required, needing aerial systems that overlap each other so that the failure of any one base station will not cause the radio signal to be lost.

The GSM-R networks are not there just to support ETCS – they also provide voice communication between drivers and signallers. However, the limitations of the network are beginning to show as, being based on 2G mobile-phone technology, its capacity and security capability is not as good as current day 4G and 5G systems. The replacement for GSM-R – the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FMRCS) – is being developed, but it will be several years before this is fully proven and deployed.

In the meantime, telecom and signal engineers and technicians have to keep GSM-R in a good fettle as the future of ERTMS depends upon it.

Level crossings Statistics show that level crossings are a major safety concern on the railway. They are where the railway interfaces with the non-travelling public.

Except for the most basic footpath crossing, with no warning lights and just a safety notice, the responsibility for safe crossing operation is down to the signal engineer.

Many types of crossing exist. The traditional swinging gates are now a rarity, having been replaced by lifting barriers, of which there are several varieties. The typical four-barrier crossing protected by signals can be controlled by the local signal box, so the signaller can visually see the state of the roadway and whether a vehicle or person is trapped inside. More likely these days, the crossing will be viewed by CCTV from a signalling centre many miles from the crossing, or even by ‘obstacle detection’, where the crossing is monitored by radar and LiDAR systems to prove that nothing is in the roadway before the protecting signal is cleared automatically.

January 2022

Kingscote miniature lever frame

The technicians have not only to maintain the barrier lowering mechanism but also to understand the technicalities of CCTV and detection devices.

Many crossings are fully automatic and are not integrated into the signalling system. Three basic types exist: automatic half barriers, automatic barriers controlled locally (ABCL) and automatic open crossings controlled locally (AOCL). The use of these depends on the line characteristics and the speed of trains.

An AHB crossing stops traffic so trains can cross at normal line speed. At ABCL crossings, which are similar but only controlled locally, a white light is shown to the train driver to indicate that the crossing equipment is working correctly and it is safe for the train to proceed. At the AOCL type, which has no gates to control road vehicles, trains are required to slow to a speed where they could stop if the crossing has not activated. 55mph is the maximum speed.

The crossings also have a Driver’s White Light.

Crossing activation is carried out by the train operating track circuits, often supported by the operation of treadles, some distance from the crossing, dependant on the local line speed. Twin red ‘wig wag’ lights indicate to the road user that a train is approaching – the barriers will be lowered and then rise automatically once the train

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has passed by. Many accidents occur at private roadway or footpath crossings because the public fail to obey the rules. These crossings are always provided with a telephone link to the signaller from whom permission to cross is requested.

Busier locations have, in addition, miniature warning lights showing red or green to indicate whether or not it is safe to cross.

The multiplicity of types and equipment has to be understood by the local signal engineers who provide a faulting and maintenance service. One of the typical incidents is a motorist not stopping in time and crashing into the barriers. This often leads to the road being closed while the barriers are replaced, with consequent local frustration, so having a stock of spares is an important factor.

While the civil engineer is responsible for keeping the roadway in good condition, it is the signal engineer who is responsible for correct crossing operation, including a full understanding of the risks involved.

Competence and training The range of systems that the signal engineer is responsible for is considerable, and many of them carry high safety risks if things go wrong. No one engineer or technician can know everything about everything, so degrees of specialisation are inevitable.

The standard of workmanship must also be high, as poor installation or maintenance can lead to serious accidents – the Clapham accident in 1988, which led to 35 fatalities and many more injuries, was caused by a loose wire touching a relay terminal, leading to a train being ‘lost’ to the system. To ensure competence, a licensing system, devised and controlled by the IRSE (Institution of Railway Signal Engineers), exists to ensure that project engineers, designers, installers, testers and maintenance staff all have the right level of knowledge and familiarity to carry out their work safely.

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Signalling Assets

Of these, probably the most significant is testing, as these people are responsible for signing off the system following installation or fault rectification work.

Licences are generic in that they assess competence on the type of work to be carried out and not the specific type of equipment.

This is akin to a driving licence where a driver is passed out on a category of vehicle but not the exact type that will be driven. IRSE licences are structured around a workplace assessor, likely to be local to where the engineer or technician is based, and a competence assessor who takes a more distanced look at the evidence that the candidate provides.

Training record Key to competence is the keeping of a logbook, in which the person records the training he or she receives as well as noting any incidents that arise during day-to-day activities. A licence is issued for a fixed term, with a mid-term review of a person’s performance. Several categories of licence exist, ranging from a senior project engineer down to an assistant technician, and it is possible to hold more than one licence.

Driver’s panel with ETCS screen – Cambrian line

To keep up to date with the engineering and technology, training courses are essential. These are many and varied and can be provided in house

by Network Rail or by training companies.

Not only do the instructors have to be competent in what they are teaching, but the premises where the training takes place have to be equipped with the devices relating to the course.

As well as normal classrooms, hands on training is often sited in a large warehouse with points, signals, control panels and level crossing mechanisms laid out as if it were a real railway.

‘An article such as this can only give a glimpse of all the aspects associated with maintenance of the signalling system. Even the term signalling looks somewhat dated in terms of today’s technology so perhaps control and command will become the profession’s nomenclature before too long.

Fascinated by what you have read? There is an opportunity begging for those who would like a challenging and varied career.

Thanks to Ian Bridges, president of the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers, for his help with this article.

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Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Smarter Maintenance

Switching from Dates to Data Optimising maintenance and operational costs is one of the biggest challenges facing the railway industry. With thousands of assets and employees for operators to manage, the careful allocation of time and resources is critical

Condition monitoring The main objective of this strategy is periodically learning about the condition of assets and preventing unplanned shutdowns.

The frequency of these planned interventions is normally based on maintenance and operational experience and equipment vendor’s advice.

Although this method works and provides a safe environment for trackside workers, it is expensive, incurs costs and requires the time of employees that could be deployed elsewhere, even when it’s not necessary.

January 2022

Outside of planned maintenance, companies also pay a great price when they cannot manage unplanned shutdowns. Research shows that companies worldwide could be saving as much as £125 million per year, as well as reducing delays for customers, if they could avoid unplanned failures.

The top contributors to delays to passenger journeys are external causes, such as weather and power failure or signalling failures.

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Maintenance workers are able to take only the necessary equipment to perform the repair, which saves both time and cost

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orrective maintenance was, and still is, the first maintenance strategy implemented by many industries. This strategy takes a run-to-failure approach that involves waiting until a failure occurs to repair the equipment or component.

Although rare, some rail infrastructure companies still take this approach to their maintenance strategy.

Traditionally, scheduled maintenance programmes are how the rail industry has approached keeping networks running. This strategy involves planned interruptions, with fixed intervals in between, for specific asset types.

The case, therefore, for alternative ways to manage maintenance on Britain’s railways is clear and, in recent years, operators have been moving towards a condition-monitoring approach.

This uses a system to continually monitor the health of thousands of assets on a given network, presenting a number of opportunities for operators to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

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Smart maintenance can be used to mitigate many contributors to unreliability and the benefits of a more intelligent, predictive fault monitoring system can be beneficial to a wide range of stakeholders.

By understanding and proactively managing the rate at which the assets on a network degrade, it is possible to ensure that passengers experience fewer delays and cancellations due to equipment failures, operators minimise any fines from rail regulators for delays, and the amount of trackside work required is reduced, which frees up operations staff to focus on other tasks.

New techniques With the introduction of remote condition monitoring (RCM) techniques, it is possible to retrieve information about the status of thousands of railway assets, ranging from axle counters to point machines and track circuits.

This facilitates more flexible, time-based maintenance strategies and gives the opportunity to learn how the asset is behaving over the course of time.

Armed with this information, infrastructure owners can identify imminent failures and act prior to their occurrence.

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Smarter Maintenance

The long-term impact

Network Rail’s Anglia route is one example of an operator that is already seeing the benefits of remote condition monitoring

The implementation of a smart maintenance strategy can offer benefits that vary throughout the lifecycle of an asset. The knowledge acquired throughout the different stages of an asset’s life can be used to support the decision-making process for subsequent projects.

The benefits, therefore, span beyond just the immediate return on investment that would come from savings in maintenance expenditure and the avoidance of penalties.

They also include the invaluable knowledge that can be acquired for use on future projects, as well as the increased levels of safety achieved through fewer site visits being needed by the maintenance team.

Apart from indicating the status of an asset’s condition at a specific point in time and offering insights around trends, smart maintenance offers advice on what is the best strategy. These recommendations can only be achieved by extensive industry knowledge incorporated into machine-learning algorithms that consider all the information available.

Deep learning, an example of machinelearning techniques, plays an important role in taking all this data and transforming it in potential action plans to improve reliability and maintenance.

One company already harnessing big data analytics to provide a smart maintenance solution is Thales.

Photo: Thales

By combining all of this data, operators can better understand the health of their assets, which puts them in a stronger position to plan any relevant maintenance and repairs.

Through understanding any problems in detail, maintenance workers are able to take only the necessary equipment to perform the repair, which saves both time and cost.

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Companies that decide to move beyond traditional condition monitoring systems are not only able to identify trends in the behaviours of their assets, but they can also obtain a detailed diagnosis of any problems. Added to this, a more complete view of asset performance can be provided by tracking several variables that can directly influence the failure of a mechanism, such as the age of an asset, its historical usage and any prior faults.

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Smarter Maintenance

Its smart maintenance platform, also known as TIRIS, goes beyond traditional remote condition monitoring methods to discover potential faults, predict when they are likely to occur and advise a corrective course of action. By processing large amounts of data that is normally underused by rail operators and maintainers, a solution such as TIRIS is able to streamline and improve upon a maintenance approach that would otherwise take considerably more time and resources to deliver. Data is gathered from a range of assets, such as axle counters, which specifically is achieved by connecting to a Thales system known as ‘AzLM’. Added to this, it can all be carried out remotely, which enables operators to manage their networks wherever they may be.

Network Rail’s Anglia route is one example of an operator that is already seeing the benefits of remote condition monitoring. Recently, a pre-emptive repair was made to critical trackside equipment on the North London line that had previously been causing hundreds of minutes of delays to passengers every month. The repair was guided by Thales’s smart maintenance platform – TIRIS. The Anglia route installed the innovative cloud-based technology in order to identify faults with axle counters before they fail. The digital technology is used to monitor more than 300 axlecounter sections on London Overground’s North London line and has now been rolled out across the wider route. As a result, engineers are now able to check the condition of the equipment remotely in real time using tablet devices or laptops. This enables them to carry out maintenance where it’s most needed and fix faults with the axle counters before they start causing disruption.

Increasing axle counter reliability has made a big impact for passengers.

Over the past year, there has been an average of only one axle counter failure per quarter, compared to an average of two failures per period in 2019,

January 2022

before the improvement programme began. In total, it is estimated that the programme has saved just under 6,700 delay minutes over the past 12 months.

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Engineers are now able to check the condition of the equipment remotely in real time using tablet devices or laptops

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Discover, predict and advise

Emma Askam-Johns, performance improvement manager for Network Rail Anglia, said: “We have made rapid progress since we began to focus on axle counter reliability in January 2020. The installation of our remote monitoring system is particularly ground-breaking. The North London line is one of the first places in the country to have this type of technology and it is playing a major role in driving down delays for passengers. It also helps us to keep our engineers safe by reducing the number of times they go out on the tracks.”

TIRIS has visibly reduced delays and associated costs through decreasing delay minutes and cancellations.

New technologies and methodologies for maintaining Britain’s railways present an interesting alternative for

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operators. The challenge of improving the efficiency of operations, while also enhancing the passenger experience, is not going to go away over the coming years. The question for railway operators is whether the long-term efficiency improvements and cost savings outweigh the initial short-term cost of implementing new strategies.

The journey ahead Smart maintenance regimes are now cheaper and easier to implement when considering the advent of new technologies such as the Industrial Internet of Things, cloud-enabled applications and big data analytics. The benefits of such an approach are also vast – from improving reliability and availability of assets and systems, by enhancing the financial performance of rail operations, to supporting improved safety levels.

Time will tell whether more operators will embrace the digital technologies that could transform the maintenance of Britain’s railways. For now, it is clear that there are far more technologically advanced options available than traditional strategies offer and the ongoing development of such solutions will only continue to further increase the range of possibilities.

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Tr o u g h i n g

Maintaining the Great British Railway Lucy Prior, SME group chair of the Railway Industry Association and business growth director of Trough-Tec Systems, explains how early involvement in projects can help even the railway’s smaller suppliers

January 2022

“Insight” are enabling Network Rail to move towards predictive rather than reactive maintenance by monitoring faults and discovering patterns in data.

The cost of maintaining our railways is growing year on year, but the highest cost of maintenance is the risk of serious, life-changing or even fatal accidents occurring amongst our colleagues who work trackside.

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It is only when we integrate processes and information that we make better decisions, reduce waste and achieve better outcomes

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he railway… must seek to deliver infrastructure and services more efficiently in order to maximise beneficial outcomes while balancing costs against revenue and taxpayer funding. This is more than just a short-term issue: we are clear that reducing the cost of the railway, increasing efficiency including through innovating with private partners, and achieving a better deal for users and taxpayers is a critical priority over the next 30 years.”

This is the statement made on the Great British Railway (GBR) Transition Team’s website in relation to the Whole Industry Strategic Plan (WISP) – the 30-year vision that will tackle cost and promote efficiency.

The railway’s supply chain is being consistently challenged to act in a lean way, to provide and perform more cost effectively.

As we emerge from the various emergency measures put in place to support the railway during the pandemic, the Treasury is demanding that the industry be more cost-effective.

Simultaneously, the Network Rail Safety Task Force is demonstrating ways in which the railway is becoming a safer place to work.

Tools such as Intelligent Infrastructure’s

This is a cost we must all aim to eliminate in whatever way we practically can. The Safety Task Force, Digital Railway, Intelligent Infrastructure and other transformative projects all share one key and irrefutably important target: to reduce the number of accidents and near misses for trackworkers.

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As a community, we must do everything we can to ensure that everyone gets home safe every day, but, as we talk about predictive and, perhaps more importantly, preventative maintenance, this is potentially how we can make the biggest difference. If we think more efficiently, as per GBR’s instruction, can we increase the number of ways we deliver maintenance works that reduce the risks faced by our trackworker colleagues?

Ultimately, we need to identify how we reduce the number of tasks that need to be carried out trackside, and then significantly reduce the time it takes to carry out these essential tasks.

Meeting the challenge To do this, we can start by reflecting on the challenge set to us by the intent of the WISP: promoting efficiency identifying the root causes of maintenance inefficiencies. The Office of Road and Rail’s (ORR) annual report ‘Cost benchmarking of Network Rail’s maintenance and renewals expenditure’ identifies, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the combination of more complex maintenance projects, poor accessibility by road, and the higher relative age of infrastructure assets contributes to higher maintenance costs.

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Tr o u g h i n g

These are all real-world examples, as referenced

by Eastern and Wales & Western regions within the report.

By comparison, Scotland cited an improved approach to the coordinated planning of works as a means of significantly improving the cost of maintenance and renewals. More specifically, the ORR report states that the “region pointed to improved co-ordination in the planning and delivery of maintenance”. This mentality has proved to be a winning formula, literally, for the region. In November’s RISE (Railway Industry Supplier Excellence) awards, Network Rail Scotland’s capital delivery director, Kris Kinnear, was awarded the accolade of client of the year.

The culture created by Kinnear and his team in the region is one of a fully integrated team, where all involved are committed to the same goal.

This integration of suppliers and clients has proved time and time again, across industries, to lead to more efficient delivery of works projects.

Well-integrated supply chains enable more proactive planning, and therefore safer and more efficient operations. Simon Murray, co-author of the Project 13 report, explains that “It is only when we integrate processes and information that we make better decisions, reduce waste and achieve better outcomes”.

How then can we encourage better integration within the railway supply chain, to drive efficiency, reduce cost and ultimately make the railway safer, particularly in relation to infrastructure maintenance? From the client or the principal contractor’s perspective, this can be achieved by effective and meaningful early contractor and sub-supply chain involvement.

The sooner the upper end of the supply chain informs and includes the sub supply-chain, the sooner they can prepare, and ensure the availability of resources and products to achieve on-time delivery.

Through earlier engagement the tier one client and / or the infrastructure operator can identify those suppliers that can collaboratively achieve the shared goals as described above. Through earlier engagement, SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises) can advise designers, project managers and delivery partners on how their products and services can be programmed in more effectively.

Case study This approach can be applied to all works programmes, from smaller maintenance to major projects. Doncaster-based Trough-Tec Systems provides an excellent case study of why earlier, more collaborative relationships across the supply-chain are beneficial to all involved.

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January 2022

Tr o u g h i n g

Part of the Hird Group, Trough-Tec is more than simply a product provider: the company actively seeks to work with its clients on a partnership basis across small maintenance to major investment projects to ensure that they provide a full-service proposition. In this way, its product innovations unlock process improvements and drive efficiencies. The company is able to work with its stakeholders to eliminate problems that arise when its key components are considered within the original design process, and not merely considered as an ancillary product.

A more efficient workflow

January 2022

Compare this to the issues cited in the ORR’s benchmarking report, and it can be argued that, by engaging Trough-Tec in this way, the challenges posed by complex projects and limited road access were significantly reduced.

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The sooner the upper end of the supply chain informs and includes the sub supply-chain, the sooner they can prepare

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By embedding its staff within project design and delivery teams, Trough-Tec ensures that certain problems can be designed out, thus avoiding costly rectifications which would occur otherwise.

It worked in this way on the Northern Hub & Northwest Electrification projects, engaging with Network Rail, Atkins and the contractor, across four project teams, supporting them all simultaneously from the initial design phase to project delivery.

During these projects, Trough-Tec discovered that customisations that it originally considered to be project and site-specific would be encountered elsewhere; this project-specific learning has had exponential benefit on subsequent projects.

An example of this was the way in which the company was able to design accessories and installation methods that protect access for roadrail vehicles, which would otherwise be impeded by troughing, ducting and other elements that should be submerged.

Whilst this may seem like a relatively insignificant element, it represents a huge time and costs saving as it eliminates the need for costly corrective civil works that would be required at a later stage whilst making an inaccessible work site more productive.

Further benefits of working in this way are multiple: this approach also ensures contingency supplies become unnecessary, and by working across multiple project teams, lessons learned in real time were reported and avoided instantaneously as well as informing the delivery of subsequent projects.

These are all examples of how a collaborative service provider has helped projects be delivered more safely and more efficiently.

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It is also important to remember that physical characteristics of the product enhance these benefits when it comes to their actual installation.

Designing in a product or service earlier can effectively design out risks to trackworker safety: the physical attributes of infrastructure assets can have a huge impact on safe working. TroughTec’s cable management systems support a safer working environment.

Lighter in weight than traditional alternatives, these recycled polymer troughs mean that fewer people are needed to complete an installation within the same possession timeframe.

Furthermore, as each unit item falls within the limit of a safe one-person lift, the need for expensive and competency-critical materials handling machinery is eliminated, which has a positive impact on both resource and cost efficiency, as well as improving the environmental impact of the works in question.

Early engagement By working in conjunction with much larger stakeholders, and much earlier on, Trough-Tec has proved that its early involvement, as described above, pays dividends for all, maximising the design and cost-efficiency of projects and possessions, and providing a product that significantly improves a project’s carbon footprint, health and safety considerations and overall costs.

The supply-chain can provide countless examples of ways in which, through earlier involvement and better integration, it can help the railway be safer and more efficient. If this ethos can be carried out more widely within track maintenance, then it can become embedded within the culture that GBR wishes to create. If we can maintain more efficiently now, we can rebuild a great British Railway that really will provide a better deal for the taxpayer and its users.

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Tr a i n P r e s e n t a t i o n

Why the digitisation of train presentation is essential

Image: South Western Railway

Toby Hawkins from ‘Software as a Service’ provider mpro5 considers the substantial returns that digitising train presentation can have and why it’s crucial that train operators invest in this ahead of rail reform

January 2022

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A train presentation team might have just a few minutes to achieve an acceptable turnaround clean

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rain presentation is as much part of the maintenance programme as having the bogies serviced, and it has to be carried out on a daily basis.

Although one of the ‘unglamorous’ elements of railway operations, and one which receives more than its fair share of complaints, train presentation (TP) is one of the areas highlighted as important as the Plan for Rail. It is also a very challenging role, requiring speed, quick thinking and flexibility.

The inherent problem with it is that, as soon as the TP teams get off the train, and the passengers get on, they no longer have control over the cleanliness of the carriages. And trains that are being used frequently can get messy very quickly.

However, in today’s hi-tech age, digitising these processes can both increase productivity and give

invaluable insight that will allow operators to optimise their operations.

TP encompasses all aspects of cleaning including seats, floors and brightwork, as well as making sure the bins are emptied and that the toilets are clean and hygienic. COVID-19 has also made it necessary to disinfect all touchpoints regularly.

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Many companies’ cleaning records are not very comprehensive. Operatives are given a briefing and some paperwork is completed, but often, as soon as that train goes into service, it’s anyone’s guess what was really cleaned.

A cycle of blame This can result in a cycle of blame. Whether it’s failing a service quality audit or a passenger complaint, TP teams often have no way of defending themselves – a ticked box doesn’t count as irrefutable evidence.

This is unfair and, in the long run, not particularly constructive. TP teams feel undervalued, and it can be difficult to make changes due to the lack of insight and evidence of what actually needed doing.

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Tr a i n P r e s e n t a t i o n

A TP team might have just a few minutes to achieve an acceptable turnaround clean. The number of people in a team or the amount of time a carriage is available can vary considerably which makes delivering a consistent result exceedingly difficult.

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This is an invaluable advantage over paper. If a TP team gets advanced warning to pay attention to a particular problem, it has time to react and adjust.

Alerts can be very specific. They can be used to send a warning to the next member of staff who scans on to a train that has recently failed its audit.

They also give TP teams the ability to provide evidence that the problem has been rectified.

Alerts give train presentation teams

the ability to provide evidence that the problem has been rectified

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Meeting SQR targets

A digital platform that manages work can also automate alerts. These can be set to trigger when certain conditions are met and are highly versatile – an alert can be sent to a TP team if a certain task was missed on the last clean, or if the train was particularly busy.

Image: East Midlands Railway

To add to this, the team might have to manoeuvre around passengers still on the train, or a team member might get asked a question and have to stop working to help someone. Frequently, TP teams are asked to do extra jobs during daily cleans that do not directly relate to their role, such as hanging out all the seat covers or filling sandboxes in the winter. With such a limited amount of time to complete their normal tasks, these small ‘extras’ can affect the overall result.

One way to overcome these challenges is to digitise the TP process so as to provide irrefutable evidence, accountability and insight.

Digitisation means taking analogue processes such as logbooks or checklists and creating digital counterparts that can be more detailed and carried on employees’ smartphones in an app. The app will upload data automatically as processes are completed.

Having the evidence to back up the work that TP teams do is crucial. Employees scan a QR tag in the carriage they are working in, then they follow their apps through all the tasks they need to complete, taking pictures as they go.

Once this irrefutable data is recorded, it can be used by other departments to resolve outstanding issues. The reasons behind staff shortages, for example, can be investigated to discover whether they were actually due to resourcing issues or to staff having been asked to replace posters in carriages.

Image: Northern

Limitations

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This will become a crucial process for all train operators when the Plan for Rail is implemented.

Williams-Shapps has outlined the primary mechanism for awarding profit will be meeting Service Quality Regime (SQR) targets, and TP will be a key component of that.

This is why it’s so important to consider digitisation of the TP operations now, because if companies do miss targets, they are going to need evidence that they are doing everything they can to rectify it.

A high standard of cleaning is now as much a safety issue as an aesthetic one, particularly during the current coronavirus pandemic. It is also critical to service quality and the passenger experience. TP teams around the UK are currently feeling that they are under increasing pressured to deliver more.

In light of all this it, how can companies not digitise? How can they afford to stick with paper in the face of both incoming government mandates for digitisation and an increased demand for cleaner trains from passengers?

A piece of paper is simply not up to the task.

Companies need detailed data that is both irrefutable evidence and that is structured well enough that ground teams and head offices can make practical use of it in daily operations and to drive improvement.

Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Glasgow Subway

Automating one of the world’s oldest metro systems

Glasgow Subway is in the middle of a major upgrade, only the third in its history, that will see the introduction of a new fleet of driverless trains

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to electric traction vehicles, and a second between 1977 and 1980 that saw the network enhanced with new stations, tunnel repairs, trackbeds and rail replacements.

Upgrade in progress

Robert Burnside, managing director of Kelly Rail, a contractor working on the Glasgow Subway modernisation.

Now carrying more than 13 million passengers a year, Glasgow Subway has been subject to two modernisation programmes in its history; the first in the 1930s, when the cars were converted

In 2010, a new £290 million modernisation programme was announced by Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT), backed by the Scottish Government, which set out plans for driverless train operation and 15 upgraded stations.

A joint venture of Stadler Bussnang and Ansaldo STS (now Hitachi Rail STS) was awarded a £200 million contract to supply new trains, signalling and equipment in 2016. This latest major modernisation project involves a comprehensive programme of infrastructure works and rollout of the first trains to operate in the UK with Unattended Train Operation (UTO), reducing the normal four-minute headway to as little as 90 seconds and offering a faster, more streamlined service to passengers travelling on the Subway.

Image: SPT

irst opened in 1896, Glasgow’s Subway system is the third oldest underground metro system in the world, after London and Budapest.

Originally, it had no rail connection to the surface of the city, meaning cars were lowered into the tunnels from the depot above. In those days, a continuous cable in the trackbed operated the system, with trains moved by a gripper that closed around the moving cable, similar to many cable car systems still in operation today.

The Subway consists of one ‘oval’ loop, 6.5 miles (10.5km) long, that runs under the Clyde and has eight stations north of the river and seven to the south. Due to the original cabledrive system, the Subway was built with two lines, the outer one running clockwise and the inner anti-clockwise, running in separate tunnels. The system has the unusual track gauge of four feet (1,219mm) and its tunnels are smaller even than those of London’s deep tube, being 11 feet (3.4 metres) in diameter as opposed to London’s 11’ 8¾” bore (3.56 metres).

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The upgrades will also see the network’s 17 new trains run in a four-car formation, as opposed to the existing three-car sets.

The Subway’s unique dimensions mean that, while the new trains are the same length and size as the existing rolling stock, passengers will be able to walk the length of the train and enjoy

Image: COWI

Image: COWI

Glasgow Subway

an open view of the tunnels from the front of the cars.

Once completed, the upgraded system will include new ‘half height’ platform screen doors, to preserve as much space and openness within the stations as possible while still maintaining passenger safety and security.

Upgrades have also seen essential work to the Glasgow Subway’s tunnel linings, delivered by Freyssinet for SPT. This work was both a huge logistical and technical task that involved 150 people working to strengthen and modernise the network’s original Victorian tunnels, using more than 175,000 bags of grout materials in the process.

Building Networks, Connecting People

Kelly Rail is a principal contractor specialising in signalling; telecommunications, electrification; and civil engineering markets, providing a safe and collaborative solution.

For more information, please call 0208 424 0909, visit www.kelly.co.uk or email info@kelly.co.uk Kelly House, Fourth Way, Wembley, Middlesex, HA9 0LH railbusinessdaily.com

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Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Glasgow Subway

SPT said that, over the past two years, engineers have cleaned and inspected 14,600 metres of tunnel and 14,000 metres of trackbed.

They have also checked and upgraded 2,800 square metres of drainage channel and carried out 3,000 square metres of grouting.

The work has both improved the structural integrity of the tunnel lining and reduced the amount of water ingress into the Subway system.

Supporting regeneration

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Engineers have cleaned and inspected 14,600 metres of tunnel and 14,000 metres of trackbed

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Another key contractor on the modernisation scheme is Kelly Rail, which was awarded a package of multi-disciplinary works on the project

by Hitachi Rail in November 2021, with works commencing in December.

Kelly Rail’s project support consists of a variety of upgrades, including signalling, telecommunications, security and fire alarm systems and installation of copper, fibre, data, audio and RF cables.

The firm’s proven track record in working collaboratively with clients and partners to define cost and time-efficient scopes and its exceptional safety record and national presence made it an ideal partner for Hitachi Rail on the works in Glasgow.

Kelly Rail’s project team of experienced signalling installers, cable pullers, civil operatives, fibre testers, fibre splicers, electricians and telecoms engineers is responsible for the works, with everyone on the team required to perform to the most rigorous standards so as to ensure safe and timely delivery on the network.

Discussing the contract award, Robert Burnside, Kelly Rail’s managing director, explained: “The Glasgow Subway contract with Hitachi is a real coup for us. We were successful as a result of our strength of presence in Scotland and our extensive experience in projects such as the Highland Enhancement Programme, which involved a full array of civil engineering works, cabling and retail telecoms.

“We are thrilled to be supporting Hitachi Rail and SPT on this transformational scheme which will provide a major economic boost to the city and Scotland, linking other transport improvements, supporting driverless train innovations and unlocking real growth for Glasgow.”

Recruitment drive Following a significant restructure in late 2021, Kelly Rail is expanding and actively recruiting for a range of engineering and operative roles, from the South of England up to Aberdeen, to meet its ambitious project targets for 2022 and beyond.

Robert added: “2022 is set to be a huge year for our business, with key appointments being made as we seek to expand our offering to the rail industry and our prestigious clients.

Glasgow subway modernisation

Modernisation complete

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Glasgow Subway

“Our aim is to be seen as the preferred partner of choice for clients in the rail industry by delivering safe, innovative and efficient customer-focused solutions. Our new structure and ambitious business strategy will help us achieve this.”

In December 2021, SPT reached a major milestone in the modernisation programme, with the testing of a new modern Stadler train in the system for the first time. The new train was tested overnight. In system testing will begin later this year, with the new fleet of 17 trains expected to be introduced into passenger service in a phased basis in 2023.

The testing consisted of a train rolling into Govan station, followed by a test of a Clayton Equipment ‘rescue locomotive’ shunting it out of the tunnel and into Broomloan depot.

The new Stadler trains will initially run alongside the existing fleet, with drivers. Once the full fleet is in service, the existing trains will be withdrawn and the conversion of the network to driverless operation will take place.

While progress continues at Glasgow Subway, a completion date for the modernisation and switch to UTO operation has not been confirmed

railbusinessdaily.com

Image: SPT

Passing the UTO test

as the complex operation has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. However, with initial testing of the first new trains now complete, SPT Subway director Antony Smith remains optimistic.

“This has been an event long in the planning,” he said. “It is an indication that things are moving forward again after a challenging year for the

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project, with the impact of COVID and lockdowns as well as the subsequent travel restrictions for our contractors.

“However, as 2021 comes to an end, getting the first train into the system is real progress and a sign that we can hope 2022 sees us get back on track with the modernisation programme.”

Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

Obsolescence

Managing obsolescence Stuart Broadbent, obsolescence director of Alstom and a director of the International Institute of Obsolescence Management (IIOM), describes how the rail industry can mitigate the risk of obsolescence

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s technology develops, today’s ‘latest thing’ rapidly becomes yesterday’s obsolete model.

Electronic technology is developing at an everincreasing pace, with today’s ‘latest thing’ rapidly becoming yesterday’s obsolete model.

Electronic systems and components are now found everywhere – in communications, data analysis, decision making and safety. In rolling stock and rail infrastructure, the increased use of electronic systems has undoubtedly improved operational efficiency and safety for the rail operator (passenger and freight) and enhanced the passenger experience. For the rail engineer, however, these electronic systems come with the added challenge of managing obsolescence.

Electronic components need proactive management to ensure long-term availability

Production life

January 2022

planned for delivery in the UK between 2014 and 2020, and the difference in the component requirements becomes clear.

The differences in the expected operational lifetimes and production volumes mean that the focus for manufacturers of electronic components will always be on latest technology components for high volume markets rather than legacy, low volume parts.

The expected lifetime of software also falls short of the lifecycle needs of the rail industry.

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Today’s hot new components quickly become legacy parts

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There is a simple reason why the rail industry is vulnerable to obsolescence – electronic components such as microprocessors have a production life of two to five years whereas rail equipment may be delivered over two to five years and expected to last 30 to 40 years.

Electronic component and equipment manufacturers are focused on their nextgeneration products and on emerging technologies. Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years, meaning more processing power in less space and using less energy; a five-year-old IC will rarely be used in the latest consumer product.

This reliance on R&D to provide new revenue streams means that today’s hot new components quickly become legacy parts as the component manufacturers follow development cycles that are driven by fast-moving consumer markets.

Mobile phone users expect to upgrade their handsets every 24 to 30 months whereas, with a development and production cycle of 10 years, even the automotive industry with its volumes is complaining about the obsolescence of electronic chips.

As well as production cycle, there is a difference in the volume of units shipped to the consumer and rail industries. Global shipments of mobile smartphones reached 1.54 billion units in 2021 – compare that to the 6,000 new rail vehicles

Microsoft withdrew support and automatic upgrades for Windows 1998 after just eight years and ceased support for Windows XP after 12 years – Windows 10 support will end in 2025.

As the graph shows, the challenge facing rail engineers is to ensure the continued operation of electronic systems well past the point at which the manufacturers no longer produce or support the components within them.

There are two types of obsolescence that need to be managed – technical obsolescence and functional obsolescence.

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Technical obsolescence means that the correct operation of the equipment cannot be guaranteed because spare parts or technical support are no longer available from the manufacturer. Technical obsolescence may occur when a component manufacturer withdraws a legacy part, so the equipment in which it is used can no longer be supported, or when a supplier no longer wishes to support a product range or goes out of business.

In addition to the obsolescence of parts, the railway engineer also has to consider the obsolescence of materials – regulations such as RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) and REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals) have stopped or restricted the use of hazardous chemicals and some raw materials.

The next generation There can also be obsolescence problems caused by changes in production tools and workforce skills – as older employees retire, younger recruits may not have been trained on the legacy systems and technologies that are still operating in the rail industry. Functional obsolescence occurs when installed equipment cannot be adapted to meet new standards or regulations for issues such as quality of service and efficiency.

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Obsolescence

In mobile-phone terms, it is only a 2G system, whereas modern mobile phone networks are currently being upgraded from 4G to 5G.

Short component lifecycles make obsolescence inevitable in equipment with a long service life.

Creating a strategy

Component life 3-5 years Equipment life 10-15 years Operational life 30 - 40 years

Examples of functional obsolescence include updated regulations for People of Reduced Mobility (PRM), changes in the availability of the radio spectrum for voice and data communication, and the lower processing power of a legacy computer that is unable to support demand for additional sensor inputs or system intelligence.

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For example, GSM-R, the European standard for rail voice and data communication that is used in the UK for both voice communication and for ETCS, will only be supported by the manufacturers until 2030, and beyond this date, it will become increasingly difficult, and expensive, for infrastructure managers to maintain the same quality of service.

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In order to determine a strategy for a product or system, the engineer needs to assess the likelihood and impact of obsolescence during the life cycle.

This assessment should take place at the initial design stage and be reviewed periodically.

If the combination of likelihood and impact of obsolescence is medium or high, a proactive approach should be followed – in which case there needs to be an obsolescence management plan to mitigating the obsolescence risks.

However, if the combination of likelihood and impact of obsolescence is low, a reactive approach can be followed – in which nothing is done until the obsolescence materialises. Should the product or system include software, the likelihood and impact of software obsolescence during the lifecycle also needs to be considered. These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Within the same product or system, there can be equipment and components that must follow a proactive approach and equipment and components that can follow a reactive approach.

Building Britain’s Railways - Major January projects 2022

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has developed a standard that sets out requirements and guidance for obsolescence management. The latest version has been adopted as a British Standard and is available as BS EN IEC 62402:2019. Whereas the previous standard took the form of a guide to obsolescence management, the 2019 release is now written as a requirements standard which is relevant to all technologies and items.

Proactive management A coordinated obsolescence management plan is essential for a proactive approach. This plan should be developed by the manufacturer during the design and build phase, and then transferred to the asset owner or operator during the service phase, with the support of the manufacturer. It is also important to create a culture of obsolescence awareness throughout the rail industry, particularly in the R&D, engineering, maintenance, sourcing and supply chain functions.

Proactive obsolescence management should start during the initial stages of product design, when the risk of obsolescence can be mitigated using techniques such as preferred parts lists, obsolescence checks on proposed bills of material, dual sourcing, technology transparency (specification of interfaces) and by undertaking technology assessments and risk-mapping. It is also crucial to anticipate and plan for upgrades and to consider the road map for each technology.

With the short lifecycle of electronic components, their availability needs to be monitored from their first use in a design. Service providers such as IHS Markit and SiliconExpert are able to provide information about expected lifecycle for components, analysis of bills of material, counterfeit risk and obsolescence alerts.

By monitoring the availability status of electronic components, the equipment manufacturer can make lifetime buys of components, based on forecast demand for production, spare parts and repairs, when the end of production of components is announced.

Mechanical components may also be at risk of obsolescence and require proactive management

With good storage techniques, components can be stored for 20 years or more, helping to ensure that the product can be supported for its complete lifecycle.

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With the short lifecycle of electronic components, their availability needs to be monitored

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est

Obsolescence

(PCNs) and product discontinuation notices (PDNs).

This standard, developed in Germany by COGD (Component Obsolescence Group Deutschland), allows obsolescence alerts to be communicated up the supply chain, with rail manufacturers adding information about possible replacement parts.

A reactive approach, on the other hand, is applicable to products with low or stable technology, or containing items with low likelihood of obsolescence such as mechanical or machined parts, and where the impact of obsolescence is assessed as low.

Strong partnerships Mechanical and electrical components can also become obsolete, sometimes by external factors such as REACH, the EU’s programme to reduce the use of hazardous substances, and sometimes by internal factors such as reduced demand, product range rationalisation, and manufacturers going out of business or being taken over. It is therefore essential that all parts at risk of obsolescence are monitored during the service life of the rolling stock.

The rail industry in France, Germany and the Netherlands, led by the rail operators and with the support of Alstom, Knorr-Bremse and Siemens Mobility, are implementing the SmartPCN standard for the management of product change notices

Effective obsolescence management requires partnership between the asset owner, operator, rolling stock manufacturer and equipment suppliers, built around a formal obsolescence management plan. It enables rail engineers to ensure that the operational lifetime of equipment can be extended far beyond the timescales supported by the original electronic component manufacturers and software suppliers.

So, despite the throw-away culture of consumer markets, the rail industry should still be able to measure the operational lifetime of its equipment and systems in decades rather than years.

Sharing information and best practice The International Institute of Obsolescence Management (IIOM) is the professional body for those involved in obsolescence management. The Institute is for professionals worldwide who wish to further their knowledge and understanding of the obsolescence management discipline, obtain professional recognition, and network with like-minded individuals from its global membership.

Members, who come from all industry sectors and all levels of the supply chain and are located in countries around the world, include asset owners and operators of systems and equipment, manufacturers of systems, equipment and components, and obsolescence solution providers.

IIOM, which welcomes corporate and individual members, is a professional affiliate of the UK Engineering Council, and its professional recognition scheme has recently been extended to include the grades of Member and Fellow. IIOM also has an endorsed trainer scheme with three training organisations delivering a short course that meets the requirements for the Associate grade.

Regular member meetings provide a mix of formal presentations and informal events at which obsolescence engineers, buyers and solution providers can exchange ideas, not just on obsolescence, but also on key issues such as REACH, conflict minerals and counterfeiting. The meetings also provide access to the suppliers of the latest tools and systems developed to support obsolescence monitoring and management.

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07/02/2022 09:46

A n d f i n a l l y. . .

Llanelli goods shed returns to life Restoring a 19th century railway asset that hasn’t been used for nearly 60 years is certainly a ‘maintenance and renewals’ challenge

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A new project

The Goods Shed Trust’s plans for the shed include a community arts centre, flexible performance space and a training and skills hub

these iconic structures, for future generations to be able to enjoy and learn more about the history of their local railways.”

Transfer of the site finally took place in January 2021, thanks to funding from the Railway Heritage Trust, the Garfield Weston Foundation, the Welsh Government and Carmarthenshire County Council, as well as Llanelli Town Council. The site was made secure with the erection of fencing demarcating the area retained by Network Rail. Access to and the security of the buildings was also improved.

Work commenced on the refurbishment of the office block, the first phase of the proposed

Image: Llanelli Goods Shed Trust

A group of local people set up the Llanelli Goods Shed Trust in 2011, with the objective of restoring the shed for the benefit of the local community.

Chaired by local MP Nia Griffith, the trust worked closely with Network Rail as it set about raising the funds needed to acquire the shed.

The Goods Shed Trust’s plans for the shed include a community arts centre, flexible performance space and a training and skills hub.

Network Rail chairman Sir Peter Hendy visited the site in August 2019 to discuss the potential transfer of the historic goods shed to the group for community use, commenting: “I’m always keen to explore and support projects like this which see communities play an active role in preserving

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ating back to the days of Brunel, the goods shed at Llanelli is a Grade II* listed building. Situated alongside the West Wales main line to the east of Llanelli station, it has been out of operation since 1966.

As the need for traditional goods sheds at stations diminished, many similar facilities were abandoned and demolished during 1960s and 70s. Therefore, Llanelli is believed to be unique in South Wales in retaining its goods shed - probably due to its size, location and facilities. The shed itself was part of the original South Wales Railway, and so was almost certainly designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his team. The office block is later – judging by the use of stone blocks and the shape of the windows it was built sometime after 1850, probably when demand for tinplate from the local area increased following the opening of the Dafen works in 1848 and the Burry works in 1875. During the 1880s, Llanelli was responsible for about one eighth of the tinplate production of Great Britain.

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redevelopment of the entire goods shed and adjacent goods yard, in March 2021. Scaffolding was erected and the roof covering removed ready for re-slating.

The initial work within the office block involved the removal of all the internal office partition walls to create an open work environment, the removal of general debris and the plaster from the walls.

This work revealed, much more clearly, elements of the structure of the building, not all of which were previously known.

The work continues The removal of rubble and vegetation gave a much clearer view of the canopied extension that originally covered the platform adjacent to Siding 2, which runs into the goods shed. Track was laid under the canopy and into the shed in June, in time for a two-car Class 143 Pacer train to be delivered at the end of the month. By August, the new rooms inside the office block were taking shape. A lift shaft was created to provide access to the first floor and power points and radiators installed.

Great Western Railway contributed £16,000 towards the project in January 2022, to help fund display material and volunteer guides to inform visitors of the history of the building and its context in terms of the local area and the railway.

By this time, the office block was nearing completion. The trust chose to have the office block’s windows painted in the colour ‘GWR Stone No. 1’ or ‘Light Stone’, the same shade that was used on window frames, cills and mullions of Great Western Railway’s brick buildings up until 1948.

Work continues as the team gets the restored goods shed ready for opening.

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