News

It was a pleasure to be invited to the Railway Industry Association (RIA) annual conference. This was a great opportunity to hear of emerging policies and thoughts of the customer base, government, regulator, Network Rail (NR), and the train companies. An opening address by RIA Chief Executive Darren Caplan, spoke of many concerns. The scrapping…

The RIA conference is about issues and opportunities affecting the UK’s railway supply chain, as Clive Kessell reports. But a significant subtext was about people, leadership and attitudes. This was made clear when Martin Howell from Worldline was asked how his career in the military impacted on his work in industry. Martin had been a…

Ask a member of the general public what composites mean to them, and what they are used for, and you are quite likely to get the answer ‘Formula One’. Which is a correct answer. Formula One race car chasses are made from a composite material – carbon fibre. As you would expect given its usage,…

As heritage railways around the country have enjoyed what was hopefully a busy summer period, it is worth remembering what an industrious winter many of those railways had prior to the summer. Many now operate ‘Santa’ or ‘Illuminated’ specials in the run up to and over the Christmas holiday which tends to be a busy,…

All railway assets have to be managed so the risk of failure and hazards arising are as As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP). ALARP involves balancing the reduction in risk against the time and cost of achieving the risk reduction. This is the point at which the time, trouble, difficulty, and cost of further measures…

We hear a lot about the ‘digital railway’ and applications which use data networks, and at the heart of any telecoms network are fibre optic cables. Individual optical fibres in the cable carry short wavelength light pulses and are used in conjunction with digital transmission systems to transmit and receive data. There have been huge…