Author: Alex Conacher

Supporter: Fugro

The railway network in the UK is old and vast and home to the first public railway to use steam locomotives in the world. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in 1825 and connected coal mines in the northeast of England.

Although it was preceded by horse-drawn rail routes along wooden tracks by several hundred years (and grooves cut in limestone paths by several thousand years!) it was the metal track, the coal-fired furnace, and the shrill whistle of the industrial steam engine that truly signalled the birth of the age of rail.

Since those early days, the British rail network has grown, contracted, and grown again into an unwieldy behemoth. The 1,400km-long island is served by some 31,091km of track (according to the Rail Infrastructure and Assets 2018-19 Annual Statistical Release) managed by Network Rail for a total route length open to trains of 15,847km. This is almost as long as the distance between London and Sydney! (17,000km)

Learning from the past

Yet because of its age, it is built on foundations of experiment, and so, on mistake. It has to deal with the scars earned while learning all of the lessons of the past – lessons that were then passed on to the rest of the world.

But although modern rail engineering is richer for these lessons, the challenges remain to this day, and asset managers have to deal with a multitude of issues such as routes built by competing railway companies, all with their own ideas; poor standardisation of early assets; windy routes designed for slower and less-frequent trains; and genuine engineering marvels, built to the very limits of contemporary ability. All of which contribute to an environment of tight tolerances, hard-to-access assets, and a network pushed to new limits every year.

It is old, it is grand, and it needs constant innovation from dextrous asset managers to keep it running smoothly and safely. But today’s technology is allowing a totally new approach to maintenance to emerge, technology that means more data and more data analysis.

Development of this technology started in The Netherlands, where an engineer developed something that led to a revolution for the British railways. But first, we need to understand more about Network Rail – the public body that looks after Britain’s railways – and how it does its job.

John Edgley is the interim chief engineer for Network Rail. I’ve been doing that for the past six months in an interim capacity. “So, one of the things the Chief Engineer looks after is the engineering team within what’s called the technical authority for Network Rail. We curate the standards that Network Rail works within for engineering and also the policy features of the engineering assets,” he says.

John and his team do a whole slew of engineering assurance work to confirm that the standards are correct and everything is running safely and he is certainly the man to ask about Network Rail’s asset management thinking. “In terms of the big picture, the way that we operate the policy setting, the way I look at it, and this is my personal view, is it’s a virtuous circle,” he says. “So we look at what we think is the reasonable amount of money that’s available for the stewardship of the assets.”

Which is part of a conversation had every five years with the ORR – the Office of Road and Rail. A government body that is responsible for the economic and safety regulation of the British railways and highways. “And we look at what their various scenarios are going to be. So, do you think we’re going to be cash constrained? Or do you think we’re going to have lots of money available to us?”

Flexibility in modelling

So the team have to run through a number of scenarios, for the tracking assets and all the other assets and determine how much money they think they need to spend to replace or maintain the assets based on the condition that they are in at that moment in time.

“We will classically have an asset policy, which we will refresh every five years,” says John but what they are moving towards is something better.  “We’ll do it on a much more dynamic basis. Perhaps every year every two years based on our prevailing understanding of what’s going on.”

With recent events, the prevailing understanding has taken a sudden knock and any model must be flexible enough to cope with variations in investment. “The world that we’ve lived through for the past six months for COVID. That was a real game changer, a complete paradigm shift,” says John. “The government quite rightly has been pumping vast amounts of money into the UK economy. Now we need to be mindful – if the UK government needs to be very careful with its available funding, we have to look at some real cash constrained models.Or, conversely if the government feels it’s the right thing to do for the UK economy to inject money into the railways to help kick start businesses and maintain the construction sector, does it want to put more money in? Therefore, we will spend more money on enhancement schemes, asset renewal schemes, and therefore that money will flow wider into the economy. So effectively we have scenarios ready for various different options that the government may wish to choose.”

Decision making is therefore absolutely key, and Network Rail needs to be able to pick the model that best fits its money and resources from on high, and the realities of the rail down on the ground. “I think the analogy I  like to use is we’ve got an ocean of data but actually what we need to be doing is turning data into information and then from information returning to knowledge and from that into wisdom.”

Right now Network Rail has a lot of silos of data. “We know an awful lot about the structures, we know an awful lot about vegetation, and so on. But what we need to do is tie that together into connected models.”

This is on the way at the moment, and John explains that they are already thinking about changing their standards from absolute limits to identify rates of change that can be used in the standards. This would enable frontline maintenance teams to prioritise their workloads not on severity of a defect, but the severity of growth to intervene before that particular issue becomes a performance or a safety related issue.

King of widgets

“Network Rail have got this initiative underway called Intelligent Infrastructure, which many of you will have already heard of, but largely what we think of that as is clever widgets on the ground, whatever measuring whatever.”

Perhaps the king of these clever widgets is an invention created in Holland by a rail data consultant at Fugro called Jos Berkers. Josspent his early career working for a rail contractor in the research and development department. It was a job that forced him to think flexibly and adapt to a range of problems, from modifying excavators so that they can grip and lift fallen poles, to understanding survey techniques and some of the limitations that have been faced historically: slow progress, and the need to have workers in a risky environment.

“In the six years I worked for the contractor I think 50% of my projects I did were about measuring,” he says.

Jossometimes worked on specialised track surveying trains, which cost tens of millions of Euros and disrupt the regular passenger train schedule. So instead for inspections on short lengths of tracks. “We developed our own measurement trolley, that’s trolleys you can push by hand over the rail, especially for renewals and easily access for short pieces, they are handy,” he says.

But there was still a problem, besides the enormous cost and disruption of measuring long stretches of rail, and the manual working required for smaller sections. The measurement for precise track location, and the measurement for its condition, were two completely separate processes. One that measured position and the other that looked at condition. “I also already noted that when you measure the rail itself, that there’s a difference between measuring it geodetically and you have equipment,  which is measuring the roughness of the rail, how is the slew and the lift……how straight is the track and what was already very surprising for me in the beginning that these are two separate worlds!”

But, Jos says, there was good reason for this. Location measuring could be done at 5km per hour with the technology of the time, making trolleys appropriate, whereas condition monitoring could be done at the full speed of a train, making the special measuring train appropriate.

But we are still left with all of these problems: workers exposed on site in a world increasingly concerned about safety, separate measuring passes for different types of data, slow working, expensive equipment, and timetable disruption.

Technology moved on, the speed of location monitoring increased, and Jos had an idea.

“What came into my mind is: well, I’ve got the idea that it will be it is possible to have those highly technology equipment in one box, having a box where you put in all the equipment and not only for measuring the strength of the rail but also the geodetic part of it. And to make it that compact that you can measure, measure everything,”

But crucially Jos wanted it to be mounted to a train – any train and he called the system RILA – Rail Infrastructure Alignment Acquisition.

The device itself is a pyramid-shaped black box that can be attached or detached from the front of a normal passenger train in a matter of minutes. No disruption to the service, the entire route is accessible, and it moves at the speed of a train – or several trains.

Taking a risk

Jos took this idea to his director at the time who wasunconvinced. “Because there are great companies around the world who make great technology and that guy and standing in front of him has had the idea that it would be possible to combine all those technologies in a little box and with everything I mentioned.”

So Jos quit his job, took a second mortgage on his house, and began working on his system in the evenings, converting his living room into a workshop after his children had gone to bed, and back to a family room before they woke up. His efforts were not wasted. “I got the attention of the Dutch railways, I got in contact with the person responsible for all the rolling stock of the industrial age. He liked my idea,” says Jos.

He made a protoype and tested it on a Dutch train in November 2007. “One of the biggest moments in my life I got a train from Dutch Railways.”

And the rest is history…

Rail survey revolution

The invention made a huge difference to survey times. “Back in the days like 10 years ago and beyond that a normal survey team took us about, let’s say two days to do a mile of a survey,” says Jasper Hellemons, Fugro Business Development Manager and a fellow countryman to Jos Berkers. “And nowadays with the system you can do 200 miles 400 miles a day. So you’re  speeding up the whole concept and saving a lot of money.”

It’s also safer. No boots in the ballast anymore. No people on the track. But it is not just about safety or cost. This method obviously renders a vast amount of data unto the rail operators, many orders of magnitude more data that can be used in new ways. This new data allows asset owners to understand the condition and positioning of a lot more assets in a quicker time, which allows them to build a baseline from which to make future comparisons – to measure degradation against. “So, the basic principle we worked out is when you do a periodical survey, you have your baseline. So, you have your situation as from that moment as it is,” says Jasper.

But data is out of date the very second after it is measured… you can probably imagine how laborious it is to re-baseline an entire rail network like Britain’s at the rate of 5km per hour. In truth it could not be done effectively. With RILA, this can be done, much more frequently and much faster. And you only need to update data that changes.

Going international

Moving to the UK, RILA’s first use was on the Network Rail’s High Output project. This is the team that basically keeps everything going – they carry out 70% of Britain’s track renewal work – and they do it quickly. The aim is to carry out track repairs overnight that would have previously needed weekend rail closures. Every night they carry out about 1.5km of ballast replacement and renew about 1.2km of rails and sleepers. But to do this they need to know where to go, and execute the job swiftly, and with surgical precision.

The first high output surveys were undertaken using RILA 5 years’ ago in Scotland.  In just two weeks, survey measurement runs of all 64 work sites in Scotland were undertaken demonstrating how quickly data could be collected.  Moving forward to today, RILA is now being used to survey high output sites across Great Britain, allowing engineers to plan the work more effectively and design the track alignment.

The use of RILA on High Output site has saved thousands of surveying man-hours and contributed to a 95% reduction in people working trackside.

Andrew Bartlett is the Route Asset Manager for track on the Wales Route at Network Rail… basically the custodian of all rail track in Wales and he polices anyone who undertakes a track intervention within his territory. “In Wales we chose to use RILA back in 2018, I think it was to record the whole of the track asset. So we could understand our gauge clear… our gauge profiles for all our structures and platforms.”

Structure gauging is analysis done to look at how far various structures are from the track. These could be signals, bridges, other bits of track… even tunnels. And more on those later. It is vitally important to understand how far things are from your trains to avoid collisions.

“We knew we had a really aggressive introduction of new trains within the Wales route as part of Transport for Wales’s transformation plans and the reason we chose RILA for it was, in essence, speed. We knew that we could get everything recorded within an eight to 10-week window. Whereas if we had relied upon traditional survey methods, it would have taken 12, 18, 24 months potentially, to do.”

Now that Network Rail has access to this ability to survey its routes quickly, it has to think about how best to implement this. How frequently to re-baseline. “On some of our high speed routes, we may choose to run it every six months, because then you can actually see the degradation of the track asset and the actual position of where the track is, but also, you could tell where some vegetation has grown and where vegetation starting to encroach on to the railway infrastructure,” he says. This can then be monitored and the risk profile calculated allowing the team to intervene at the right time.

Engineering trees

Vegetation management is a very topical issue for Network Rail, and John acknowledges that greenery should be managed, rather than destroyed. “I believe our vegetation or forest management somebody said to me was of the size of the Isle of Wight,” he says. “What’s been realised over the last few years is actually we needed to reconsider how we viewed our vegetation assets, to be precisely that, assets, because we’re not just curating… or curating them on behalf of the UK PLC and the general public. Because actually, when you’re sitting on a train you’re looking out, you’ll actually see a bit of greenery. So if you’re in the suburbs might be the only bit of greenery that see in your working days. So we need to be careful about how we look after that, considering it, as I say, as a positive asset rather than a liability, which I confess, we probably largely did in the past.”

A recent review of Network Rail’s stewardship of trees has recently been undertaken, and Network Rail is currently mulling over the recommendations. “Obviously, it’s very dangerous to have vegetation that’s too close to the track, because it can either strike the rolling stock or potentially a tree can fall on the line, or even the old leaves on the line situation,” says Mark Thomas, Rail Business Manager for Fugro’s asset integrity business in the UK.

The traditional method to undertake an assessment of vegetation, like many other forms of assessment is a visual assessment. And that’s often carried out by people entering the track doing a track walk and recording what vegetation is close to the track and what vegetation has the potential to grow into the envelope where the rolling stock runs through. Obviously, this has the inherent disadvantage of actually needing to get onto the train. But there’s no real record of what inspectors have seen or the option then to replay the video for someone else to take it take a second look at it. Network Rail is employing in-cab video to record the growth of the vegetation, but this has limitations as you can only see the surface layer.

“It’s very difficult to see further back within the vegetation and maybe even outside of the railway boundary. It’s important to recognise that you know, tall trees outside the railway boundary count can pose a danger to the operational railway. So it’s important that we can get a view of that potential risk as well,” says Mark.

Fugro has been looking at incorporating LiDar to get around this. Lidar stands for Light Detection and Ranging – it’s a system that uses pulses of light to detect the distance of objects and surfaces which can then create a 3D representation of the target. “So we have two main systems that we deploy on the railway in the UK we have what we call FliMap, which is a helicopter born aerial LIDAR, a downward facing LIDAR, essentially. And we have, the LIDAR that we have on RILA which gives the track view as it were.”

By combining these two data sources, Network Rail will have data from above, which is very important in understanding how vegetation relates to the railway where it sits in relation to the railway boundary. And from underneath as it were with the RILA LIDAR, “So we’re able to look at things like the tree bough on the underside of the canopy. Now by integrating these two data sets, we can get a very good idea of what the vegetation actually is,” says Mark.

So the actual species of trees, their height and inclination.“Now interestingly, as I said, we have the ability to map out the species of various different trees and vegetation that we see within the LIDAR data. And this gives us the ability to then predictively look at how the vegetation will grow over time.”

Predicting maintenance into the future

Technology has been, and is still being developed that allows rail operators to understand and manage their assets more effectively. New technology extending the usability of old assets that are facing ever-increasing passenger demands. Over the past two decades rail journeys increased  by 97%  to reach a record 1.8 billion journeys in 2018/19, increasing faster than any other mode of transport.

Constant innovation will be needed into the future, not just in ways to gather data and work on our assets, but also in new ways to think about how we use data – our strategies and the way we operate. “It would be absolutely wrong of me to say the assets in the UK are unique. We work within our own paradigm,” says John Edgley. “So we have railways which have been built in terms of track formation structures and so on. In the olden days when we had steam railways, we didn’t get the same speeds we do now. So we would have built those in a much more twisty curvy kind of fashion.”

So a lot of the effort that we apply is actually managing the footprint of what would be an elderly Victorian railway in a modern setting, when you overlay the challenges of introducing power tools, railways and maintaining the power systems in what is often a very constrained envelope.

“And there are numerous locations around the UK where, through trying to do the right thing at times, we’ve done the wrong thing in the long term because there’s no way of the drainage, the formation to drain out under some of these structures. So there’s a large piece of assets we have to go through. And also we’ll need to be keeping an eye on what the future requires,” says John.

Andrew Bartlett points to new surveying technology as well as artificial intelligence as another way to understand and manage our Victorian assets. “We’re also using some of this data now to plug into some artificial intelligence software which recognises particular asset types so we can re-position exactly where abouts those assets are,” he says. And all of this is a massive change for the industry.

“I think, pretty much we could be on the verge of in the next five to 10 years of fundamentally changing how we do manage the rail network. I mean, we still need to run trains on steel wheels or still run on steel rails. However, we need to become more proactive and intervene when forecast rather than intervene when something’s failed. And it’s a whole kind of like mind shift.”

Special thanks to Fugro, Network Rail and, the Permanent Way Institution.