Unlocking Innovation – Southern Style

The Railway Industry Association (RIA) staged its latest Unlocking Innovation event in London on Wednesday 12 June.

Held at Network Rail’s Networx facility adjacent to Blackfriars station, the combined conference and exhibition attracted over 300 delegates, all eager to hear from the seven keynotes speakers and visit the 41 stands from the industry and its supply chain.
RIA innovation director Milda Manomaityte welcomed the audience and explained that this was one of a series of events being held in conjunction with Network Rail regions, examining their particular challenges and opportunities and considering how the supply chain can help meet them using innovative products and techniques.

The previous event had been held with Eastern Region in York, while the RIA Innovation Conference had been held in Newport this year with support from Network Rail Wales & Western.
Now it was Southern Region’s turn, and regional head of engineering Robert Frith introduced the challenges he was setting the audience.

The Southern challenge

“Innovation is really, really hard on the railway,” he began. “And often there is an expectation from stakeholders that we can achieve more than we actually can.”
He reminded the audience of a comment from Mark Enzer, strategic adviser at Mott MacDonald and a member of the Engineering Policy Committee at the Royal Academy of Engineering, who said that the railway already has 99 per cent of the infrastructure that it needs, the challenge is keeping it all relevant.

To get the most from its budget, Southern region has moved to a new delivery model for capital works – the Southern Renewals Enterprise (SRE) – to deliver the £9 billion renewals portfolio between 2024 and 2034 (CP7 and CP8). This model is based on the Institution of Civil Engineers’ Project 13 principles – an approach to delivering infrastructure projects that is more collaborative, allows long term planning and has proven to deliver better outcomes for customers.

The SRE consists of the Capable Owner (Network Rail), the Southern Integrated Delivery (SID) team, and the Ecosystem. The Capable Owner is part of the DEAM team (Director of Engineering and Asset Management) at Network Rail. It owns and manages the assets, defines and confirms what outcomes are needed and assures, ascertains and verifies the development and performance of the assets, the portfolio and the Enterprise. It is no longer seen as the ‘Client’, but as part of the actual Enterprise.

The SID team is the ‘integrator’, managing day-to-day activities and holding the Enterprise’s people, processes, systems, priorities and strategies together. The SID team is made up of VolkerRail (track works), VolkerFitzpatrick (buildings and civils), Octavius (electrification and plant) and AtkinsRéalis (signalling), with Network Rail delivery units undertaking minor works.

The Ecosystem is the dynamic framework of strategic and wider supply-chain partners that provides goods and services to the Enterprise. “This is where the innovation happens,” Robert said, “as it allows each of the partners to engage with the same suppliers, to get common technologies, common systems, common processes across the whole of the Enterprise.

“So, the key challenge for today is – how do we use this to access as many of our suppliers as possible, to innovate and to keep the railway relevant?”

London

Thomas Ableman, director of strategy and innovation at Transport for London, looks for innovation to answer very specific problems – with 14 transport modes and 28,000 people, there are a lot of things his team could focus on, but they resist the temptation. “We take certain, specific challenges that the organisation has not found a solution to and try to solve those,” he explained.

Recently, they have been looking at how to help cyclists to navigate around London safely using digital solutions, accessibility at stations and mapping solutions, and at improvements to the bus network.

There are four specific problems he would like the rail supply chain to help with. “We currently have no solutions,” he said, “and we would like you to help us find them.”

The first is the challenge of the platform/train interface (PTI). “We have roughly 1,500 to 2,000 PTI incidents every year on our network,” Thomas stated. “The vast majority of those do not end in serious injury and almost none in a fatality, but there is roughly one fatality every five years. We have a very clear target that the Mayor of London has set us to have zero deaths on the transport network by 2041, so we clearly have work to do. We have done a lot with CCTV and other technologies, but we clearly need help with PTI.”

The second challenge is the problem of tube noise – the noise impact of services on residents living above tunnels. “If we try and insulate the tunnels, to prevent the noise leaking out, we end up with the sound reverberating to passengers, making the travelling experience worse as we try to reduce the noise for third parties. So, how do we make the situation better for everyone, including the passengers?”

The third challenge is dust. While the ULEZ (Ultra-Low Emission Zone) is improving air quality above ground, dust is still causing problems in the Underground – dust from train brakes, dust from track work and even dust from passengers. As yet, there is no solution to this problem.

And the fourth problem area is “stuff being nicked.” “We lose millions of pounds a year having to replace kit that’s been stolen,” said Thomas. “Or we have to go and repair stuff that’s been vandalised. Bus shelters are a particular problem, but there are parts of the railway that have problems too.”

To make it easier for people to propose innovations to TfL, later in 2024 an online portal called ‘Tap In’ will be launched – Tap In to Innovation – so anyone with a good idea can propose it and the TfL innovations team can then review the suggestions and decide which merit being taken forward.

On the Trains

Dan Piner, senior design and innovation manager for South Western Railway, listed the seven focus areas that have been identified as playing a part in improving customer satisfaction while travelling:

Punctuality
Seat Comfort & Space On-Board
On-Board Environment
On-Board Wi-Fi
Guard Visibility
Passenger Information in Disruption
Station Environment.

He then gave examples of some of these – a project to improve guard visibility using virtual reality and being delivered in conjunction with Chrome Angel, working with Woosh to install QR codes across the 158, 159 and 444 fleets to provide real-time customer information as well as the functionality to report faults and find out onward travel information, supporting Signapse with a ‘First of A Kind’ funded project to then translate the customer information into British Sign Language in real-time, and developing software alongside Glimpse and other suppliers to detect on-board live occupancy and convey this information to customers via the app, website and customer information screens.

South Western Railway has co-founded the TOC Innovation Community, supported by Rail Partners. A number of train operating companies are already involved and the ambition is to gain strong involvement from them all, resulting in one voice and one shop window for innovation.

Research and Testing

Rod Anderson of the University of Southampton outlined the resources available to the supply chain from UKRRIN, the UK Rail Research and Innovation Network. World-leading experts in several fields – digital systems, rolling stock and infrastructure – can assist in the research, development and testing of new technologies.

UKRRIN members are grouped into three centres of excellence, each one led by a major university (Birmingham – Digital Systems, Huddersfield – Rolling Stock, Southampton – Infrastructure) working in partnership with several others. Cranfield University, the University of Leeds and University College London (UCL) offer cross-cutting expertise and facilities to the network as a whole.

Testing is led by Network Rail, utilising its test facilities at Melton Mowbray (Old Dalby) and Tuxford (High Marnham).
Dave Looney, head of product strategy at Telent Technology Services – a strategic partner of the Unlocking Innovation programme – explained how Telent is protecting passengers, services and infrastructure through the use of technology and artificial intelligence (AI). He gave examples of how the company’s work with data specialist Purple Transform has brought about improvements in the fields of safeguarding human lives, tackling criminal activity, improving the customer (and staff) experience, reducing trespass and remote condition monitoring.

MICA, Telent’s Management Integration & Control of Assets platform, improves customer experience and operational performance by consolidating communications for fire, security, building management and digital intelligence systems. It does this through innovation by using a single, operator-friendly user interface that enables control-room staff to manage stations efficiently during both normal operations and disruption.

Aaron Barrett, lead research analyst at RSSB, introduced delegates to the Rail Technical Strategy, which is being refreshed in 2024. First published in 2007, the RTS has evolved from being government-driven to industry owned and has been key in releasing and appropriately targeting significant research funding. It is intended to be:

Focused: majoring on key technical problems and opportunities that need industry attention.
Compelling: setting out steps needed in the short term towards the longer-term vision.
Not R&D centric: acknowledging that factors beyond research and development are essential for successful deployment and adoption.
Dynamic: keeping it live and up to date with progress reported against the goals set out.

The new, fifth edition of the RTS is being authored by a core working group comprising representatives from RSSB, Network Rail, both academic and industrial UKRRIN partners, the Rail Delivery Group and the Great British Railway Transition Team. It will include a new priority – freight – aiming to increase network access for freight, improve asset management and safety, give greater asset utilisation and enable greater intermodality while reducing carbon.

The final keynote speaker was Jez Smith, Dail Data Marketplace service owner with the Rail Delivery Group. He urged delegates to treat data as an asset – look after it, try to improve it and understand who owns it.

He also urged companies to share data, not to treat it as proprietary information. “We need to recognise that we don’t know everything,” he said, commenting that poor data quality is no reason not to share, someone else may be able to improve it for everyone’s benefit. Public-sector data is just that – public. If it is not immediately available, then ask for it.

Exhibitor spotlights

Once the presentations had ended, delegates flocked to the 41 exhibition stands spread over three floors of the building, eager to seek out new ideas and innovative thinking. RIA members had five minutes to deliver a Spotlight presentation of their own to anyone who was interested – and many were.

Unlocking Innovation strategic partners Network Rail, UKRRIN and Telent all had stands and made presentations, while so too did other organisations, large and small. Whether they were major companies such as Siemens Mobility or SMEs like geofencing specialists Tended and Onwave, they all had their five minutes in the spotlight.

The next Unlocking Innovation event will focus on Scotland, organised in collaborations with Scotland’s Railways. More details about the venue and the programme can be found on RIA’s website, events page.

Link to event pictures