The reliability and availability of rolling stock and fixed infrastructure underpin the experience of passengers and freight customers.
Expectations are increasing whilst the operating environment is becoming more challenging. Assets need to be more resilient to cope with extreme weather events becoming more common and, under extreme conditions, to fail safely. Intensive use of assets drives up the need for maintenance whilst leaving smaller windows to carry it out and an often long life cycle creates a need to improve the performance of ageing assets.
New technology itself, whilst being a vital part of the answer, creates new challenges. In particular, the growing reliance of new technologies on software creates increasingly complex scenarios for potential failures.
The increasing expectations and use of the railway drives up costs. Yet at the same time there is pressure to offer better value to passengers and limit funding from the public purse. Assets need to do more but cost less, not just in terms of initial capital cost but their whole life cost. This requires new approaches to maintenance and life-extending techniques and materials as well as initial appraisal and selection for new assets. Other components to whole life cost, such as consideration of the circular economy, are becoming increasingly important to understand and enact.
We need to be pragmatic with the timing of deployment using key windows of opportunity, whether that’s the refurbishment of a train fleet, the renewal of life-expired signalling or the political appetite to restore Beeching lines.
Above all, we must remember that the railway is a complex system and treat it as such, implementing system changes rather than isolated projects.
Technology and technical development have already played a significant role in improving the reliability of assets over recent years.
For fixed assets, reliability is up by more than 15% in the last five years. This has been achieved through investment and insight: investment in train-borne inspection equipment, monitoring, machine learning; insight through decision-support tools, combined with local knowledge from devolution, building a stronger understanding by local teams of their assets.
For rolling stock, reliability has simultaneously been improved and made more challenging by technical developments in monitoring combined new fleet introductions. Sharing best practice for fleet management has positively impacted reliability, together with stronger collaboration between operator, manufacturer, maintainer and depot.
Opportunities to create a reliable and easy to maintain railway exist across all assets and rely on progress against three goals:
1. Improved reliability and availability of existing systems is achieved by continuing to improve existing components in critical assets and developing pragmatic solutions for single points of failure present in legacy railway design.
2. Safe and rapid inspection and repair is achieved by increasing and improving automation. Key developments are autonomous inspection and repair tools and techniques to reduce and ultimately remove the workforce from dangerous and repetitive tasks. And building understanding and confidence on how humans and machines will interface, including where responsibilities reside, are key to enabling these changes.
3. Step-change in reliability, availability and whole life cost for new assets is achieved by designing for reliability at component and system levels, ensuring easy ‘plug and play’ for maintenance and future upgrades and engaging our workforce in co-creating more value-adding roles through technology.
Innovating towards these goals across the railway, and proudly building on our technical achievements, will ensure a railway that can be safely and affordably maintained with minimal disruption. Creating a better future for our passengers and freight customers.
