Network Rail to set aside £245m a year for innovation

Network Rail is looking to reallocate a portion of its annual renewals and upgrades budget to focus on innovation. The aim is to drive down costs and improve the efficiency and reliability of its assets over a longer period of time than at present.

According to Jon Shaw, Chief Engineer and Acting Group Director of Safety, Technology and Engineering at the organisation, NR is planning to invest £245 million a year – or around 0.5% of its annual turnover – into new technology.

Shaw claimed this work will save the country’s railway infrastructure owner around £1.4bn a year as it will be able to predict asset degradation more accurately. This, he said, could save “thousands of minutes in delay times” as key lineside components would be able to be replaced before they fail and cause problems.

“We need to get out of the boom and bust we’ve seen before,” Shaw said. “We need to know exactly where to spend our money to get the maximum benefit of long-term safety and performance. We also need to reverse the current trend where the cost of significant work is increasing.

“We are getting less work for the same amount of money and this is not sustainable in the long-term. The solution is to hold back a little bit of that money and to invest it in innovation and technology so we can understand our assets more deeply and how they perform, how they degrade and how they fail.”

Shaw claimed the new Class 345s and Class 800s are generating seven petabytes of data, with data being supplied on the overhead lines and track geometry. NR’s estate has around 6,000 sensors providing data.

“I believe we can improve train performance most by deeply understanding our assets,” he said. “Rail is slow. We are significantly behind the police – they are using machine learning to predict re-offending. We’ve got to catch up.”

As well as ensuring renewals are scheduled appropriately, Shaw indicated he is keen to use technology to reduce the number of bridge-strikes by lorries, as well as working with large fleets to better educate drivers.

He said: “If you’re a lorry driver there’s a crude way to test how big a bridge is and that’s to crash into it. In addition we fail to stop even when we’ve got red lights and a barrier in the middle of the road. We’ve got to do better.”

Shaw concluded: “Driverless vehicles can connect directly to traffic lights to make sure they are stopping at red lights. We’re working with manufacturers of that technology because it is possible to get a vehicle to stop at a level crossing when a red light flashes.”