Rail adhesion
3Squared has taken an innovative approach to mitigating the perennial problem of ‘leaves on the line’
3SQUARED’s innovative answer to ‘leaves on the line’.
Each and every autumn the rail industry resumes its annual battle with leaves on the line.
According to Network Rail, approximately 500,000 leaves fall onto its metals each year, where they can then be compressed by passing trains into a smooth, slippery layer.
The low adhesion that results from this problem means that trains need more time to stop and start in order to avoid wheelspin and overshooting platforms or signals – in much the same way that a car can be affected by black ice.
What’s more, by interrupting the connection between track and train wheel, fallen leaves cause the electrical track circuits needed for signalling systems to become less accurate.
Aside from the obvious safety risk to passengers, leaf fall results in more than a million minutes of delay per annum. Reduced timetables are often required and trains are sometimes taken out of service at short notice if they incur wheel flats - all significant extra costs to operators.
There are a number of ways to partially mitigate the impact of leaf fall, however, with NR employing a comprehensive year-round vegetation management programme.
Meanwhile, from early October to early December, a fleet of over 50 specialist railhead treatment trains are deployed on affected routes to blast away the fallen vegetation with water jets, and then apply a sand-based gel to further improve wheel grip.
Although it is the effects of leaf fall that gains the most attention from both the media and wider travelling public, it isn’t just in the autumn that low adhesion can occur, and it is often forgotten that railhead contamination can occur at any time of year from rust and grease. Snow and ice can also decrease adhesion levels in periods of low temperature, as can light drizzle after a long, dry period, or even morning dew.
In response to this adhesion challenge, award-winning technology consultancy 3Squared has stepped forward to develop an innovative digital solution, in conjunction with the Met Office and Colas.
The consortium’s ADS (Adhesion Digital Solution) works by managing, coordinating and then disseminating real-time adhesion information.
Data from the Met Office’s existing lowadhesion forecasting model is combined by ADS with crowdsourced driver-reported data on actual railhead conditions to give operators detailed, up-to-the-minute, route-based adhesion forecasts.
ADS provides this high resolution and route-specific risk data to drivers via an app uploaded to a tablet device mounted in the cab so that informed decisions can then be made on train regulation that helps reduce safety risk and the likelihood of accidents.
Drivers are then able to report wheel slippage through the app, providing a warning to others in real time.
3Squared’s Commercial Director James Fox explains: “This collaborative project takes a dramatically different and innovative, datadriven approach to solving a problem that continues to cause significant disruption on the UK network.
“We found that Colas was experiencing some big problems with wheel slip on heavy freight trains on some routes, the Met Office was keen to provide a more accurate forecasting tool, while we had the technological expertise - it was the perfect time to come up with a solution.”
The funding to develop ADS from concept to delivery has come through the rail
This collaborative project takes a dramatically different and innovative, data-driven approach. James Fox, Commercial Director, 3Squared
standards body RSSB’s TOC17 competition to identify projects that will improve operational performance.
3Squared has led the consortium developing ADS by providing project management, software development and systems integration expertise, while the Met Office has supplied its specialist data and Colas has tested the product on some of its services.
Fox adds: “We found that Colas was already being provided with a basic adhesion forecast by Network Rail, but it was vague and not particularly up-to-date or route-specific, so we thought we’d collaborate with the Met Office and the operator to provide a more accurate tool.
“The TOC17 competition was there and was a good fit, and it has really helped accelerate the development of the project. The trial with Colas over the autumn went really well - we’ve learned some valuable lessons and made further improvements, and now some other operators are keen to roll it out this autumn.”
3Squared was in the process of compiling statistical information for RSSB on the exact operational benefits achieved by the trial as this issue of RAIL went to press, but Fox’s attention has already moved to several other promising future applications of ADS.
He also points to the strong collaborative nature of the ADS programme, upon which 3Squared has prided itself since its formation in 2002.
It has been the formation of similarly close partnerships with other clients that has underpinned the company’s rapid growth from a small two-man digital and creative agency based in Sheffield, to one of the rail sector’s leading software solutions providers.
For example, 3Squared’s collaboration with Stagecoach-owned train operating companies East Midlands Trains and South West Trains, plus freight operating company GB Railfreight, yielded the first of its flagship RailSmart suite of products in 2014 called RailSmart EDS (employee development system), that earned 3Squared a Queen’s Award for Innovation ( RAIL 864).
Meanwhile, in addition to ADS, 3Squared is also working closely with RSSB on an innovative software solution that helps improve disabled access to the railway, as part of RSSB’s Rail Accessibility Challenge.
Fox concludes: “ADS has huge potential and we have people currently looking at sanders [train-mounted sandboxes that drop sand in front of the driving wheels to increase traction in wet and slippery conditions] where we could potentially link our software to operators’ hardware in order to link automatically with these trains.
“There is also the potential to integrate the software with train-mounted cameras so that the Met Office can corroborate the data they currently provide, and subsequently increase the accuracy of its forecasting.
“ADS is still at an early stage of commercialisation, but the product’s future looks very bright, and it is yet another example of the 3Squared mantra that we have ‘collaboration in our DNA’.”