Railway is years behind the curve

The railway is years behind other infrastructure sectors in adopting new technology, a senior government official has warned.

Nick Smallwood, chief executive of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, and head of the Government’s project delivery team, said other industries were reacting much more quickly to change.

The former Shell vice-president said: “I don’t see leading-edge technology being developed on the railway. How many automated track laying machines do we have? Is it the norm? Are we having automated design?

For stations or platforms: do we design one, then build many? In the big bad world we are entering after EU transition, we need to do better.

“Compare rail with the construction world. Is the railway using tracking and tracing of materials using barcodes or (better) chip technology, so you know in real time where everything is?

“Are you using GPS technology on badges, so you know where your workforce are and how productive they are being? There is a whole raft of things that you could steal with pride from other heavy industries.”

Smallwood said the UK’s public sector use of digital technology is far behind other countries. He called for a longer-term pipeline following years of “gross underinvestment in that space”.

He added: “Rail is not top of the pops in project delivery. Highways England is ahead. And the Department for Education is leading the way on modern methods of construction, with schools of limited designs: design one, build many, maximising offsite construction, minimising risk, speeding up the work.

“The railway gold-plates projects. No one takes ownership of the gold-plating, it just sort of happens over time. It’s about delivering what is acceptable financially - the private sector would love to gold-plate everything, but it can’t afford it.”

Network Rail Chief Executive Andrew Haines responded: “I see people in Network Rail who are gold-plating schemes because they have not been designed in a cost-constrained environment. They offload risk by overengineering. That is a large part of the story on Great Western.

“The way we negotiate track access has been criminally expensive. These are things we can change ourselves in the very short term.”