GBRX to drive strategic innovation – what’s the plan for engineering?

In February, Rail Minister Lord Peter Hendy described how GBRX has been established to deliver one of the five priorities that Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander has set for the Shadow GBR (Great British Railways) organisation which are:

• Integration between operators and Network Rail to ‘rip out duplication’ and ‘simplify the management of track and train’.
• Drive up operational performance.
• Reform the fares structure and ticketing processes.
• Fostering innovation, including partnering with ‘world leading innovators, particularly around AI’ to ‘create a better passenger experience and greater efficiency’.
• Be ‘a force for positive change beyond the tracks’.

Priority 4 is to be delivered by GBRX which Hendy advised “will break the pattern of slow adoption that has historically held our railways back due to fragmentation, contractual complexities, and the way our system operates particularly across the track / train interface.”

GBRX’s managing director, Toufic Machnouk recently advised the Railway Industry Association (RIA)’s innovation conference how his new organisation will help modernise the railway faster and embrace new technology more effectively. To do so it will bring together industry and academia and enable different parts of the railway to collaborate more efficiently.

These statements raise two questions: is the industry slow in adopting new technology and what can GBRX offer in addition to the existing industry bodies that promote innovation?

Adoption of new technologies

As shown in Issue 211 (Nov/Dec 2024), in 1987, the development of 125mph track renewals handbacks was only possible as British Rail’s Inter City profit centre saw the benefits of the required investment. Hendy is right to point out that misaligned incentives on today’s railway can be a significant barrier to progress, especially if those who spend significant sums do not get significant benefits.

Yet it is GBR, rather than GBRX, that will provide an industry structure that aligns incentives. Furthermore, Rail Engineer has reported on various successful initiatives across the track / train interface including the ADHERE and VTSIC features in this issue. Another example, reported in Issue 204 (Sept/Oct 2023), was the use of train operators’ passenger train to collect gauging data for Network Rail. This was done by a train-mounted gauging unit which gauged 14,987 structures over a six-week period. Eight years previously, such data was collected by Network Rail’s structures gauging train.

This is just one example of a train operator’s train being used to provide Network Rail with worthwhile infrastructure data.

This year, RIA’s innovation conference had numerous examples of the adoption of new technologies. Furthermore, with 7,500 vehicles being ordered since 2012, the average age of the UK passenger fleet is now 17 years. As a result, most trains are state-of-the-art as they are digitally enabled with hundreds of sensors. The recognition of the importance of sharing open data has resulted in the creation of a rail data marketplace. This enables data app developers or tech firms to use it for various applications including infrastructure monitoring and customer innovation.

It is certainly true that rail’s adoption of new technologies is sometimes slow and ineffective. This was illustrated by our report in issue 201 (Mar/April 2023) about the ORR’s 2023 report on Network Rail’s technology adoption. Yet, with many examples of new technologies adopted in recent years, we feel it is unreasonable to portray the industry as slow to adopt new technologies.

Existing innovation enablers

Organisations that currently promote rail innovation include Innovate UK; Connected Places Catapult; UKKRIN (a partnership between industry and academia); RSSB; RIA; Network Rail and individual train operators. These organisations have formed partnerships, brought together industry and academia and have led collaborative initiatives between different parts of the railway. In essence, they are already working in many of the ways that GBRX says it will.

Yet the roles of these various innovation bodies and how they work together can be confusing, especially to those new to the industry who wish to offer their innovations. GBRX is to be a strategic innovation body and so may well provide a better focus for innovation. As it has been created to deliver a government priority, it may also be better placed to remove some of the barriers to the adoption of new technologies.

However, the scope of its activities in relation to other rail innovation bodies has yet to be clarified. GBRX has also yet to define the key problem areas that it expects emerging technologies to address. It will be interesting to see how these differ from problems that are already being addressed.

Where’s the plan?

As readers may recall, GBR was first mentioned in the Williams Shapps report which was published in 2021. A key commitment in this report was the production of a 30-year Whole Industry Strategic Plan (WISP), the first version of which was to be produced in 2022. This plan never appeared.

The professional engineering institutions who contributed to the WISP consultation exercise all stressed the need for the railway to be engineered as a whole system. As there is no one organisation with the financial, technical, and operational authority to oversee the design, investment, and management of the whole railway system, fleet, infrastructure and timetable strategies are not aligned.

Integrating these strategies in a WISP would specify the optimum engineering solutions for the railway to deliver customer requirements by providing sufficient capacity, performance, and facilities in a sustainable, safe, and cost-effective manner. This would also support strategic Government objectives such as decarbonisation and economic growth.

Hence the lack of a WISP is a significant omission from the Government’s plans for GBR which only appears to consider railway engineering in respect of the introduction of new technology. Yet new technology should not be considered in isolation as much of the railway currently operates in a sub-optimal fashion as full advantage is not being taken of existing railway technologies.

Engineering the railway

Having reported on emerging technologies such as AI and robotics, Rail Engineer understands their potential benefits. Yet such technologies are not a panacea, and some problems can only be resolved with better use of conventional technologies.

As an example, a 1,600 tonne intermodal train hauled by a 2.4 MW Class 66 diesel locomotive can only average 45mph up to the gentle 1 in 300 gradient from Willesden to Tring summit. After climbing the 1 in 75 gradient up Shap fell, such trains typically crest its summit at 19mph. Mixing such slow freight trains with 125mph passenger trains eats capacity. This loss of capacity can only be addressed by freight locomotives having the power that only electric traction can provide, for example the 3.7MW Class 90 locomotive.

This is one of the many reasons why almost all rail freight on the European continent is electrically hauled, which compares with about 5% having electric traction in the UK. It is to be hoped that the creation of GBR may enable a whole life view to be taken of the costs and benefits of electrification. In the absence of the promised WISP, the RIA report ‘Delivering a Lower Cost, Higher Performing Net Zero Railway by 2050’ is an excellent example of such a railway engineering strategy document. This report has also been endorsed by the Committee on Climate Change.

Another strategic rail engineering requirement is the need to replace the GSM-R network and its obsolete 2G technology. As we describe in this issue, the proposed Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) offers 5G technology. This will provide a significant increase in bandwidth and data handling capability which will be necessary for large-scale ETCS deployment and future train communications to meet future passenger and business needs which will no doubt be required by the technologies that GBRX wishes to see adopted. However, there is nothing in the public domain to show that it has been accepted that GSM-R needs to be replaced.

Government pronouncements about GBR quite rightly stress the importance of improving the passenger experience by bringing track and train together to unify the railway network. From an engineering perspective, this should provide a technical authority to oversee the whole system though it is not clear how such a body will function. Nor has anything been said about the need for the whole systems plan mentioned in the Williams Shapps report.

Instead, the only government priority for Shadow GBR relating to engineering is creating GBRX to introduce new technology. Rail Engineer supports this aim and wishes GBRX well in its goal to accelerate technology adoption. But this is not enough as GBR also needs to make best use of existing technology. This needs engineering leadership which ensures that the customer requirements are delivered by the most appropriate mix of new and existing technologies.

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