Testing on the hillside

The song ‘We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside’ comes to mind as I take a taxi up a Welsh valley to the miner’s welfare hall at Onllwyn, 15 miles northwest of Swansea.

This is the base for my visit to the Global Centre of Rail Excellence (GCRE) which is constructing a major rolling stock and infrastructure test and innovation facility the size of Gatwick Airport on an opencast mining site on top of a Welsh hill at a projected cost of £400 million. At first, this seems to be an unlikely concept, yet it has the potential to provide an essential service to the rail industry while transforming an area which has not recovered from the loss of its mines.

The idea comes from the Welsh Government which, after engaging with the rail industry, saw an opportunity to both provide such test facilities and create prosperity in an area affected by decades of de-industrialisation. While developing this idea, the former Nant Helen opencast coal mine was identified as an ideal site. It is big enough for the required test loops, could be purchased at an affordable price and its remote location enables testing can be done around the clock. It is also rail-connected and close to deep water ports.

Developing the site

The Welsh Government first announced its proposal for this test facility in 2018 when it appointed Arup to produce an outline design and an environmental statement. The 700-hectare site has been subject to extensive surface and subsurface coal mining activities over the past century. The site is not flat and will require cuttings and embankments necessitating more than one million cubic metres of earthworks which have been designed with an acceptable cut and fill balance.

The environmental statement, which was completed in 2020, considers environmental mitigation for visual impact from the adjacent national park; noise and traffic impact on adjacent settlements; topography and ground conditions; ecological sensitivities; and water resources and drainage. The site’s northern boundary is adjacent to the Brecon Beacons National Park and there are several public rights of way across it, some of which will be extinguished with better connected routes created, with plans for 12km of cycle paths.

GCRE was formally established in 2021 and obtained financial commitments of £50 million and £20 million from the Welsh and UK Governments respectively. A further £7.4 million of R&D funding is being provided from Innovate UK to promote construction innovation. The overall cost of the test facility is expected to be £400 million, hence GCRE requires private investment to supplement its kick-start funding.

Planning permission from local Councils, which allows 24 hour a day operation, was granted in 2021. The Welsh government purchased the site from Celtic Energy in October 2022. This consists of the Nant Helen hilltop, the summit of which is 335 metres above sea level, and on which the test tracks will be built with sidings and support facilities about 100 metres below it, at the end of the branch line by the village of Onllwyn.

Work on the preparatory earthworks and clearance of the Onllwyn coal washery buildings started in 2022. However, the main earthworks and test loop construction await private sector funding.

Nant Helen

GCRE will be an independent railway controlled separately from the Network Rail branch line. As far as possible, people will be separated from its operation with automation of train operations. Initially, it was proposed that there would be a single-track 6.9km rolling stock test loop and a 4km infrastructure test loop, both with passive provision for double track. However, to reduce the significant costs of earthworks required for both test loops, it was decided that the infrastructure loop should be on the same formation as the rolling stock loop. Hence there are now to be two 6.9km test loops – an outer one for rolling stock testing and an inner infrastructure test loop. These will be electrified at 25kV AC with passive provision for 3rd and 4th rail electrification.

The rolling stock testing loop will be constructed to Network Rail’s Cat 1A 200km/h TSI standard to European loading gauge. It will have 530- and 800-metre radius curves with two straights of 1,100 and 1,430 metres. Although built to 200km/h standards, its configuration will only allow 177km/h running. Signalling will be ETCS level 2 with the only conventional signalling being that required for connections to conventionally signalled lines. Both test loops will have full 5G and GSM-R coverage.

The infrastructure testing loop will be constructed to typical Network Rail 120 km/h standards to various track designs using recycled equipment where possible. The maximum speed on this loop would be 113 km/h. It will have conventional signalling with track circuits and axle counters with four-aspect signalling in both directions with an ETCS level 2 overlay.

It will have a section for testing novel infrastructure at which the two test loops will be separated by a bund to ensure that infrastructure testing presents no risk to the rolling stock testing loop. Apart from this section, both test loops will share the same 20-metre-wide formation.

Onllwyn

The test loops are accessed by a line with a 1 in 37 gradient from the Onllwyn site which was originally the coal washery at the end of the Network Rail branch line. This site will become a multi-purpose GCRE hub with a wide range of facilities including approximately 4km of track, sidings where rolling stock can await, begin, and end its turn on the testing loops, further storage sidings, and washing and fuelling roads including future provision for hydrogen trains and other alternative fuels as well as a four-road rolling stock maintenance shed. Although it is anticipated that most rolling stock will come to GCRE by rail, the centre will be able to accept trains delivered by road.

Basecamp will extend to the village of Onllwyn and will be GCRE’s shopfront. It will support the many different users of the GCRE who will spend extended periods of time at the site.

The Washery Campus at Onllwyn will also include a multi-storey control building from where testing activities will be managed, a multi storey staff block with overnight stay facilities, conference facilities, and a research and development centre. GCRE is collaborating with the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Railway Research and Education (BCRRE) which is working with Welsh Universities to develop this R&D centre. It is intended that the Sarn Helen Technology Park will be developed over time to the west of the Washery Campus to become a world class research and development centre.

A sustainable net zero railway

GCRE intends to become Britain’s first net-zero carbon operational railway with an estimated power consumption of up to 30MW. This will be powered by a 12MW on-site solar farm and a direct connection to a local 20MW wind farm. Its 25kV AC overhead line electrification will be fed by a static frequency converter.

The facility will offer future opportunities for large scale renewable energy generation and storage with space for solar farms of up to 32GW, five wind turbines up to 75GW, and battery storage of up to 1.725 MWh. This offers various research opportunities, for example on the novel use of energy storage in railway environments. There will also be provision for storage and development use of hydrogen, bio methane, and other net zero fuels.

GCRE will also embed low carbon and sustainable or recycled materials in its construction. For example, two miles of rail track replaced by Network Rail as part of the Severn Tunnel track renewals will be reused at the GCRE facility.

Rolling stock testing

The electrified high-speed test loop offers efficient first-in-class testing, fault free running, modifications, and upgrade testing, with on-site engineering and innovation facilities. GCRE’s branch line access to South Wales Main Line provides easy access for UK stock for which it can be difficult to find train paths for mileage proving runs. European stock can be transported to GCRE using nearby deepwater ports.

It will be possible to use both test loops to run in a ‘figure of eight’ to create dynamic changeovers between ETCS level 2 signalling / ATO and conventional signalling with track circuits, axle counters, AWS, and TPWS. Such rail system integration testing could be particularly useful with the implementation of ETCS programme.

GCRE can also test rolling stock systems such as suspension, ETCS, and novel train control. To do so, in 2022 it acquired a fleet of three 2004-built Class 360/2 EMUs which previously operated Heathrow services and became surplus to requirements when the Elizabeth line opened.

The rolling stock test loop will also have a representative station platform and virtual stopping points. It will be possible to incorporate defects for train certification. Furthermore, GCRE also provides the opportunity to facilitate the approval of new rolling stock by providing an offline live railway environment to demonstrate new stock to approval bodies.

Infrastructure testing

To test infrastructure, the intention is to run heavily loaded, unmanned GCRE Class 360/2 units and other trains yet to be acquired. They will run for 16 hours per day under Automatic Train Operation (ATO) or will possibly be remotely controlled. These trains will run five days a week in a 10-week cycle followed by a two-week downtime to set up and remove experiments. In this way, every three months the loop’s infrastructure will be loaded with five million gross tonnes, giving 20 million gross tonnes annually, with over 60,000 axle passes. While this is being done GCRE will offer a full digital on-track testing analysis.

The infrastructure test loop will be able to incorporate all types of new infrastructure. It will have a replaceable bridge deck, a section for testing switches and crossings, and one for testing novel OLE. In addition, it will offer accelerated endurance testing of long-life railway assets to give an understanding of how such assets will perform in the future.

As an example, the test loop could include a section of recycled rail, sleepers, and ballast from HS1. Subjecting this to endurance testing would enable HS1 to understand degradation and failure mechanisms before they occur on the real railway to develop a future proofed asset management plan.

Innovation in construction

As well as supporting innovation though its testing facilities, Innovate UK recognised that constructing the GCRE facility provides an opportunity to support construction innovation for which it has provided R&D funding of £7.4 million. This money has been awarded to winners of an innovation competition in which entrants must demonstrate how their innovations will reduce whole life costs, reduce timescales, or result in more efficient materials handling or efficient use of resources.

The competition has two phases. The 24 winners of the first stage, announced in January 2023, were each awarded a grant of £25,000 to produce a feasibility study for railway construction innovation while constructing the GCRE facility. This had to address one of nine themes: trackwork; OLE; earthworks and structures; power supply infrastructure; telecommunications; perimeter and cyber security; monitoring and maintenance; railway operation and automated systems; or ecology and habitat creation.

These winners were then invited to enter the phase 2 competition for funds to develop and demonstrate their innovation during GCRE’s construction phase. In January 2024, the 14 companies who had won the phase 2 competition were announced. In total they had been awarded innovation funding of £5.9 million, as shown in the table below.

GCRE’s future

GCRE is an ambitious project for which there is a great deal of support. It has signed agreements for use of its facilities with a range of companies. These include Network Rail, CAF, Xrail, Frauscher, Ricardo, Thales, and Hitachi. Additionally, over 200 UK and European companies have signed a letter of endorsement stating that a purpose-built site for research, testing, and innovation of rolling stock, infrastructure, and cutting-edge new technologies is urgently needed to tackle the challenges faced by the industry.

Moreover, the annual global rolling stock market is growing at 3% per annum and estimated to be worth over £50 billion by 2030. Hence there will be a significant demand for new rail test tracks, especially as few current facilities have long loops for high-speed running. There is also pent-up demand for infrastructure testing as there is no significant European facility for accelerated rail infrastructure testing.

Hence it is clear that GCRE has many potential customers and so would seem to be a worthwhile investment. Yet raising the required £300 million investment is a significant challenge. GCRE CEO Simon Jones recently stated that he hoped to get this funding over the line later this year. If so, the major earthworks, which cannot be done during the winter, could start in April 2025. Moving more than one million cubic metres of material to create a 6.9km loop with 20-metre-wide track bed formation would then take until September 2025. After the installation of track systems, it is expected that GCRE would start to operate its first test trains in 2027. However, if finance cannot be raised in time it will then not be possible to start the major earthworks until April 2026.

The vision is that GCRE will become a leading hub of research and innovation that provides customer-specific engineering and operational test programmes. This could also provide a representative, offline, ‘live’ railway environment for companies to demonstrate new products in a much more accessible way than is currently the case. In this way it is intended that GCRE will eventually host the railway equivalent of the large Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA) technology park at its automotive proving ground near Nuneaton.

GCRE also aims to re-build local prosperity through social benefits for neighbouring communities which have not recovered from the area’s de-industrialisation. It is intended that 1,100 new jobs will be created over the next decade. It has been estimated that every £1 spent on the GCRE facility will deliver £15 of wider benefits.

At this challenging economic time, it is to be hoped that funding can be secured for this worthwhile investment.

Image credit: David Shirres