Protecting the supply chain

“Having spent over two decades in the UK railway industry, I’ve never seen a situation this dire. Slow CP7 spending is hitting suppliers which forces layoffs. The industry is losing skilled professionals at an alarming rate, with engineers, site managers, and experienced rail workers moving to other sectors due to job insecurity.”

This is just one of many such comments to be found on LinkedIn. In a survey of 52 companies at the end of 2024, the Railway Industry Association (RIA) found that 39 were experiencing a significant hiatus in work and 22 were considering redundancies. The 2024 rail workforce study published by the National Skills Academy for Rail showed that the rail workforce declined by 9.4%, predominantly in the supply chain.

One reason for the slow start to CP7 is the wait for this summer’s spending review. It is hoped that this will set out a plan for visible and smooth volumes of work. The current ‘boom and bust’ cycle, results in skill shortages which, if unaddressed, will increase future costs for both the rail industry and the taxpayer.

With no immediate prospect of an electrification rolling programme, OLE design and construction personnel are particularly at risk. Yet there are various ‘no regrets’ cases for electrification. These include lines to the London Gateway and Flexistowe ports which would retrospectively require six and 26 route km of electrification. This would offer significant WCML capacity benefits by making it possible for freight trains to have electric traction throughout their locomotives throughout their journey.

Four years ago, the Williams Shapps report promised a whole industry strategic plan which never appeared and is not mentioned in current Great British Railways (GBR) proposals. Instead, the only government priority relating to GBR’s engineering is the formation of the GBRX organisation to accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).

While this is a worthy ambition, it is also important to acknowledge that engineering the railway to best meet customer needs requires an appropriate mix of emerging and current technologies.

While AI offers significant benefits it also presents significant risks. These issues were explored in a seminar organised by the IMechE and IRSE which focused on decision making, failure prevention, and infrastructure monitoring. This seminar considered AI’s significant benefits though it recommended that AI should not be used for any safety function above Safety Integrity Level (SIL) 1. For comparison, signalling controls require a SIL 4 system.

Applications using emerging technologies will require significantly increased data and voice transmission to and from trains. Currently, such transmissions are handled by the 2G GSM-R system that was developed in the late 1990s and will soon be obsolete. Hence, as Clive Kessell describes, GSM-R needs to be replaced by the 5G Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS).

The implementation of FRMCS was covered by the ‘Signalling the Future’ conference on which Paul Darlington reports. This considered projects and issues from a wide range of countries from which common themes emerged. These included the need for standardisation, simplification, proactive obsolescence management, and less customisation, as well as efficiencies and economies of scale to reduce costs.

From signalling’s future to its past, we have Railway200 features describing the early development of railway signalling and telecoms. For example, telegraphs and mechanical interlocking which were respectively introduced in 1838 and 1843. The huge technical developments in signalling and telecoms over the past 200 years still follow many of the principles established in the railway’s early years.

An impressive recent development in Scotland is the Initiate system which integrates the engineering access planning into the signalling system. This enables complex possession limits to be pre-programmed so that when the possession is taken protecting signals are simultaneously placed at danger. As we describe, this system eliminates the risks associated with placing detonators and speeds up the time required to set up the possession to provide, typically, an extra 30-minutes productive time per possession.

The article “Do rules keep track workers safe?” is the result of my experiences of 20 years ago, when I found possession rules did not address the practicalities of engineering work and were confusing. Having been advised that little has changed since then, it is hoped that this feature will stimulate discussion, particularly about the process for producing possession rules.

The Vehicle/Track System Interface Committee (V/T SIC) and ADHERE (ADHEsion REsearch challenge) research programme managed by RSSB undertake essential work across the track train interface. Their work was recently presented at a conference on which Malcolm Dobell reports. This included ADHERE reports on conductive sand and sticky leaves, as well as V/T SIC initiatives on infrastructure monitoring and the modelling of rail defects.

The first part of the East West Rail project to provide a rail link between Oxford and Cambridge opens later this year to provide a train service between Oxford and Milton Keynes. Yet, with the EWR route between Bedford and Cambridge requiring a new railway on a yet-to-be confirmed route, services from Oxford to Cambridge are not expected to start until at least 2034. Planning a new rail route is a complex matter as David Fenner describes in his feature on the EWR route consultation.

Planning HS2’s route was also problematic. Outside Birmingham its route requires a Delta junction. As Bob Wright describes, this is the most complex section of HS2, featuring embankments, cuttings, and 13 viaducts carrying tracks over motorways, local roads, existing rail lines, and rivers. Bob’s report describes the complicated construction methodology and innovative design of these striking structures.
Finally, we have an aviation feature which explains why net-zero aviation is a myth. In its Net Zero report, the Committee for Climate Change calls for the demand for flights to be restricted and for modal shift from planes to high-speed rail. Government has rejected this advice and has instead decided to build a third runway at Heathrow while claiming that aviation has green credentials.

In 1975, British Rail ran an advertising campaign pointing out that other forms of transport are costing the earth. In this year of Railway200, it would be good to see the industry similarly debunking false net-zero aviation claims and explaining why trains are engineered to be particularly energy efficient and therefore carbon friendly. This should be both stressed and celebrated.

Image credit: Network Rail