Rail Innovation 2015

Engineer Innovation

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PROMOTING INNOVATION

NIGEL WORDSWORTH

Innovation. If you look the word up on Google, top of the list is that fount of all knowledge – Wikipedia.

Accessing that page, the second sentence states: “Innovation can be viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulated needs, or existing market needs.”

In other words, new ways of doing things whether we realised we needed them or not.

Which isn’t a bad description. Solving a problem we didn’t even know we had is the ultimate innovation.

his views on the subject. It is one he is passionate about, having spoken on the topic at numerous events over the last couple of years. He will no doubt touch on it again in his keynote speech at Railtex in May – so go along if you have the chance.

Talking of events, David Shirres reports on RIA’s conference in 2014 as well as its more-recent ‘Unlocking Innovation’ workshop – one of a series the association runs every year. Both are more than talking shops, they are very focussed days when a lot of good work gets done.

Solving problems

Under the track – and under that

However, there are quite a few problems that the railway industry DOES know it has, and it is these which get discussed every year at the Railway Industry Association’s (RIA’s) annual Technology and Innovation Conference.

There are many forms of innovation. New products which do things in a better way, or new techniques and processes, they can all be innovative.

With the challenges set in the current railway control period (CP5), to do more for less (and safely, as I was recently reminded), the industry needs all the innovative help it can get and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole point of RIA’s annual conference. Experts in their field discuss new approaches and the latest developments over two days with no mundane business to get in the way.

As it is such an important topic, innovation is covered in Rail Engineer on a regular basis. This special supplement contains several key articles that have appeared since the last conference, and what a mixed bag they are.

To start with, and to emphasise the importance attached to innovation at all levels of the industry, Network Rail’s chairman Richard Parry-Jones gives

RIA’s own Innovation Award winner in 2013 was a trackbed stiffness tester developed by URS. It’s new to the railways but has been used elsewhere, mainly on highways and airports, before. Chris Parker visited the system developer and found out about MOABS at the same time.

Under the trackbed, old bridges can often cause problems. After as much as 150 years, the constant pounding from passing trains starts to make masonry bridges look quite second-hand.

A way to spread the load is needed and that can be accomplished by ‘unifying’ the ballast – in other words, sticking it together in one big lump.

Balfour Beatty Rail came up with this one and the secret of success is in controlling the amount of polyurethane ‘glue’.

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Welders, trains and drones Then there’s the track itself. Continuous welded rail has been around for years, but only now has the technology existed to take flash butt welders, subject of many puerile jokes in the office, out into the field to do the job properly. Rail Engineer’s Stuart Marsh went to the Network Rail test track at High Marnham, now known as the Rail Innovation

and Development Centre, to learn more about the process.

To improve the railway, one has to understand it properly. Surveyors with theodolites and, more recently, total stations are a common site on railway embankments and stations. But more recently it has been more about the spy in the sky – remote-controlled unmanned aircraft (drones) fitted with LiDAR and other gizmos tell us what we need to know to make decisions on what needs maintaining and what doesn’t. It’s not surprising that the operator of these machines is called Bionic Eye. But innovation isn’t only about the railway’s track and infrastructure. The trains themselves come in for their fair share of advanced technology. Ricardo has developed a way to recycle mechanical energy on diesel-powered trains using flywheels which spin at 60,000rpm, coupled to hydraulic digital displacement pumps. Clever stuff.

Train-builder Bombardier was part of that project.

And the Derby-based team has been working on electric trains as well. Why use overhead wires when you don’t need to? A good battery (or 95,040 good batteries to be precise) can power a four-car train in normal service over a distance of 48 miles.

No wonder it is called an independently-powered EMU (IPEMU). Grahame Taylor took a ride.

Stations are not excluded from innovative development either. How do you guide a blind person around a busy (and dangerous) railway station? As Paul Darlington reports, you get the station itself to give them directions, to the platform, the toilet, even the shops. It’s all done through a mobile phone using Bluetooth, and it has been developed by Microsoft working with the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.

Now that’s Innovation.

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RICHARD PARRY-JONES

Defining innovation T

here is a spectrum of innovation. At one end of that spectrum there’s micro-innovation, which you might call kaizen or continuous improvement, where everybody has little opportunities to make small improvements to the way that they work. The power of that is enormous but it’s accumulative. It needs deployment across the entire organisation as it’s more of a way of working than a ‘big light bulb’ type of idea.

And at the other end of the spectrum there are transformational interventions, such as digital communications. Usually those are technology driven, or at least technology enabled. So, for example, I would describe this as a macroinnovation, something like just-in-time delivery systems.

You may say, “Where’s the technology in a just-in-time delivery system?” But the way you implement that system relies, to a certain extent, on technology - particularly with certain supply chains.

The more obvious macro-innovations are things like electrification, new approaches to rail and switch designs and, of course, the impending signalling changes. Those are transformational macro-changes.

So how is Network Rail going to deliver changes in CP5 and beyond? I think a lot of what we have to do in CP5 is to put the foundations in place for the good things that are going to happen in CP6.

It’s absolutely about innovation, but it’s about micro-innovation as much as about macroinnovation.

At route level The headline-grabbing ideas are always macroinnovations. However, a huge amount of the improvements we’ll make are the ones that don’t attract the headlines but are more about people working on improving how they work every day.

Innovations, of course, offer plenty of

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opportunities but also offer risks, and so one of the challenges with innovation is how you manage the risks. How do you manage the risk in such a way that you can spot the potential failure modes in advance of you implementing them? You have to put corrective actions to the potential failure modes and controls in place, protection controls and assurance controls, so that as you make those changes, you’re doing it in a controlled way.

It’s very much this movement into the direction of actually capturing and harnessing more of the employees brain power as well as their hand and muscle power to contribute to the business.

Many of our routes are already starting down this journey.

Phil Verster (route managing director LNE), for example, is championing this in the North East.

It’s all about getting down on the shop floor, giving people the tools and encouraging them to figure out ways of how they can improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of their business.

Sometimes they can go so far with everything that’s inside their control, but then they discover actually there are things that they rely on from other parties that are causing them not to be able to make the next available improvement.

What’s really important is that the management then steps into the space and says, “Thanks for the update, that’s great, you’ve done this and that, I can see this is a problem, I’ll take it on to help you go and fix it.” That way, you generate a

huge belief that we mean this because they can see management taking action to help them, and that’s really important.

The other thing that’s really important is that management spends time to promote good practice. Sometimes it’s easy to talk about innovation but if leaders then go off and do something else then the workers are very depressed and will quickly work out that management doesn’t mean it. But when we spend time on it, we’re telling people we think it’s important. So the leaders that are doing this work are role-modelling the importance of innovation.

I went up to Manchester recently to judge Martin Frobisher’s innovation competition day.

He’d put up a few prizes and organised a big marquee. There were individual stands with two or three people round each. I walked around them all. They each had five minutes to get their point across - we timed them.

Martin (area director LNW) helped me judge and we went around all the displays and there was a fantastic fund of ideas. The best ones, in many cases, were the simplest. For example, one of them came up with a special kit containing everything to make temporary, quick fence repairs so that, when you’re out there, you’ve got all the right tools in place to get the temporary repair done - you can always do a more permanent job later. He developed it for his own use and now he’s sharing the idea.

There were other ones that were a little bit more technical but still fairly simple. One was an ultrasound sensor on two plastic poles and a lamp. As well as having a lookout, you put these two poles up to mark the boundary between the safe and unsafe parts of a site. If anybody breaks the ultrasound beam, all hell breaks loose with

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lights and sirens. It’s all very cheap, all off the shelf parts, and has no big lead time. It’s a great idea.

This just happens to be one of the more high profile examples but I think we are making huge progress on realising that the next step of this journey has to embrace this innovation across the spectrum.

The pace of change We’ve got to be very careful, though, that we don’t flip from being too slow to too fast. There are some reasons why we are very cautious, which I don’t need to explain, and I think actually that the record we’ve managed to achieve in the UK railways demonstrates that we haven’t got it all wrong by any means.

If you do the international comparisons on efficiency, on punctuality, on safety and so forth, we’re in pretty decent shape as a railway system and as an innovative operator. Therefore I’m very careful not to say that what people have been doing is all wrong - it isn’t. But I do think we can do better. While we want to accelerate the pace of innovation, we need to make sure that we complement that by putting in place the right set of controls, so that we are able to innovate faster but without increasing any level of risk that we take in terms of what the customer faces.

We can take some business risks, but we always protect the customer from the consequences of those risks. Yes, we might spend a bit of money on a project or two that doesn’t work out but, if you look at the portfolio of things we undertake, because of all the positive outcomes, we are willing to take some risks and have a few unsuccessful projects. We understand that is one of the overheads of being innovative.

But you have to put in place introduction protocols, and criteria, and good judgement on the part of the people doing that, to make sure that those risks are contained. We understand them, and we deal with them before they get deployed to the point where they impact on our customers.

Internal or external innovation I think innovation from outside is really successful where there’s partnering going on, collaboration, with somebody at the operational level.

A really good example is micro-piling. We’re working with a fantastic supplier on this. We’re working on it together, developing it together, and so there’s ownership inside the company from the team that’s using it and sponsoring it.

There’s a really good understanding of what’s needed, both from the clients’ side and from the supplier, so by the time it’s got some traction in the first applications, it’s a lot easier to absorb into and get broad deployment.

So we’re open to partnering. I think that David Higgins, in his time here, did a terrific job on putting in place the whole attitude of the way forward is collaboration. It’s not about: we know what we want, put it out for a bid, choose the cheapest supplier and off we go. That is not the modern way of working.

The modern way of working is here’s a broad outline of what we want, talk to us about how you can solve our problem and tell us what price you want to offer for it.

This is really true, of course, of the major infrastructure projects because we can see huge proficiency savings if we allow the people to come in early in a project and help us co-design it. But that applies right down to micro-innovation, if people collaborate then the path to implementation is a lot smoother.

I heard a tale of a bridge replacement job which a contractor was tendering for a couple of years ago. They said, “Well, we’re naturally going to put in an offer in accordance with the specification. However, we can think of an alternate way of doing it that could to save half a million pounds. But then it becomes a noncompliant bid and they just won’t accept non-compliant bids.” Their opinion was that our mind was closed to the non-compliance, even if it saved money.

That’s the process that used to exist before the early supplier selection and then collaborative development of design specifications which we’re now following. Simon Kirby led the implementation of this in Infrastructure Projects.

I’m not saying it would never happen now, because we’re a very big organisation, but I think the model that we’re pursuing today is very different.

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One of the areas where we are doing a lot of work is in the modular construction of hardware, the transition from everything being built in-place to modular pre-fabricated solutions, the so-called ‘plug and play’. The economics have shifted very much in favour of doing that because, even if it’s more expensive than the traditional route, it’s quicker. With the problems we have getting access to the railway, these types of construction methodologies are going to be hugely attractive from a financial point of view.

So I’m very excited about that, and I think we’ve got lots of examples of where we’re using more pre-fabrications, and those really come about by working together. It only started to come in towards the end of CP4 so we are still at the beginning of that journey.

High output The other big thing is, of course, the high output machines - whether you’re talking about plain line renewal or whether you’re talking about the overhead lines that we’re going to do on the Great Western electrification. Again, these are big innovations. Some of them are not easy to implement and it’s a tough learning journey.

These machines are big investments. They are the right way forward, but you have to build into the plan sufficient time to debug, develop, fine tune, refine.

For example, in my previous life (at Ford motor company), when we started manufacturing a new model, it took us about five minutes to produce each car.

So we thought: “How are we ever going to make money producing a car every five minutes?” The answer was, we had six weeks to improve our production methods and get it from one every five minutes to one every 52 seconds.

We’re on the same journey here, it’s just over a longer timeframe. I think Steve Featherstone is doing a nice job for us on renewals on raising the productivity and the output of our machines. He has come up with lean methods and is looking at better ways of working, as well as machine reliability. He looks at all the root causes, what’s causing us lost output, planning, getting the machines on site, access for the trains, all the things that can wrong and working diligently on every aspect of it to grind out waste.

For example, and again this is all about innovation, the approach is a mixture of two strategies. One is where we can get longer possessions to get better productivity and to get better outcome, to reduce the overhead of the setup and takedown, as we did at Warrington and on Wessex. But we’ll never get enough long possessions to do all the work we need to do.

So, at the same time, the team is figuring out ways of working in parallel rather than sequentially so that we can get more pre-work done before we actually open up the site for doing the work.

Once the machine is up and running, we can make it go a bit faster but that’s not where the big opportunity is. The big opportunity is making sure that, when we get access, everything’s in place. All the materials are in place, all the people are there, all the machines are there before we start threading new rail. So we cut out five or six sequential operations and make them parallel.

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For example, we can put in temporary devices a week in advance then, when we’re actually on site, we just throw a switch. We’ll tap into the knowledge of people who’ve been doing this for a long time, and then bring a few experts in to help them do things. That’s a good example, actually, of the combination of micro- and macroinnovation.

We’re essentially on the path of increasing mechanisation and automation, and the reason for that is not dissimilar to what’s happened in the manufacturing sectors. By applying technology to the design of machines and to the control of machines, we can get higher productivity, we can get higher output, and often we can get a better quality outcome, a more repeatable better quality outcome.

Looking after our people Of course, I don’t personally believe that any of this will ever replace workers. Instead, it moves workers higher up the value chain so that the machines are doing more of the basic work, and the workers are doing what humans are really good at which is the dexterity work and the work that requires human intelligence.

We’ve got to reduce the amount of time people are doing a particular operation. Over the length of their career, they’ll probably need to move on to a less arduous physical job at some point because of the physical stress involved. So what can we do? Well, for example, we’ve got some very nice little fixtures now that takes some of the back-breaking work of actually holding grinding machines and that provide more precision to the grinding operation.

So those are early examples, we are still working on others.

Research and development This kind of research is important for our future.

When I first started in this job, I campaigned for a research and development fund. We weren’t successful in getting all of the money we asked for, but I’m not surprised and I’m not disheartened. For CP5, we have a fund of £50 million so we’ve got sufficient money we can get started. It does require us to match the funding, but there are plenty of opportunities for us to do that. We’ve got a project portfolio assembled to spend that money on.

I think it’s really important, if we want to have a sustainable railway, to invest in R&D. If you look at the amount that we were investing as an industry in R & D, it doesn’t really compare with the benchmarks. We are at a very low level, well below 1% of revenue.

In the automotive industry, we’d typically spend 3.5% of revenue and that’s because we were a very big company indeed. We were approximately 15 times bigger than Network Rail, so we had

economies of scale. In the aerospace industry and in the higher value industries, and I think railways is a high-value, technically-intensive industry, the benchmarks are typically somewhere between 3 and 6%.

So the conversation I started was: let’s have a big argument in a few years’ time whether it should be 3 or 6%. But can we at least move it from 0.3%? And make a start before we have that big argument?

So we have made a start, we have good support from the ORR and from the DfT. We also have a lot of interest from BIZ because, as we’re spending all this money on the railways in the UK, there’s a real opportunity for the UK if we invest wisely.

Now, there’s no way Network Rail can fulfil its duty of responsibility by favouring UK suppliers, causing the railway to be inefficient compared with the choices we have for international suppliers. Of course we can’t do that, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look at ways of encouraging UK suppliers to be competitive and

Ordsall chord.

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to be successful in those bids in a fair and open way. So we are supporting initiatives such as the transport Catapult, which has been set up

by BIZ and by the TSB, by co-funding projects using the money that we have to help bring in more government money and other partners’ money.

We’re also bringing in the SMEs, because one of the great things about the catapults is the lovely catalyst for academia, the SMEs and the big tierones and OEMs to work together.

International reputation We also have innovations outside the catapults and other spaces. We have academic partners, we’re continuing to build those up, and we’re gearing up to benefit from European funding.

The European railway industry tended not to talk to us very much, but that’s changing quite a lot. We’ve had people coming to the UK to learn about our rail interface expertise for quite a long time but, interestingly enough, we’ve got people coming to talk to us now about our asset management approaches.

People have discovered that we’ve actually got quite an innovative approach to asset management that is much more scientific rather than based on some very simple intervention intervals or ‘find and fix’ which is the alternative method that some companies use. We still use find and fix, but we also have an overlay of monitoring degradation rates and looking at how we predict when we will have to intervene. Remote condition monitoring (RCM) and deployment is a part of that, but it is only the beginning of harvesting the benefits. After the beginning of RCM, you find out where your problems are and you intervene before they fail.

But as you build up all the data, you start to see the characteristic curves so that you can actually see what’s happening long before you reach the threshold of failure and you can then design your maintenance intervention techniques.

When you’re doing renewals or enhancements, you can feed that information forward to the

supply base and say, “Actually we want to change the design spec because now we know a bit more about the degradation rates.”

I think that we are leading the European railway industry in this. I don’t have the data to be certain, but the empirical evidence is that people are coming to us to learn, and that’s a good sign.

We are able, with our very small consultancy company, to win contracts against significant and very competent international bidders, again demonstrating at least some evidence that we’ve got a position of commercial advantage to some of our clients.

Being demanding The best customer a supplier can have is a demanding customer. So, for us, the best customers we can have are demanding train operating companies, because ultimately they make us better. The more demanding customers are, the better you become. You may curse them at the time, but they make you better.

And so if we become a more and more demanding customer to our supply base, we’ll be a bit of a nuisance and there will be lots of challenges although, to be honest, the Brits like a challenge. We have lots of great engineering companies in the UK and we will help them win business not only with us but around the world, so that’s the opportunity for UK plc with this innovation agenda.

Even when the equipment is not made in the UK, such as high-output plain line machines, we have a possessions and access regime that these machines are not designed for. They’re designed for much longer possessions, so we are having to be very innovative about where we deploy them to get the value out of them. At some point in the future I would like us to be in a position where we are more influential in the design of some of these machines, and are able to shape their specification in a way that is helpful not only to the UK, but also to the rest of the European industry.

I’m interested in discovering ways of changing the spec that they can not only sell to us on a

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customised basis, but also sell to all our other customers. Why am I interested in that? Because then everybody shares the overhead of the R&D, tooling and development work on that machine.

So we’d enjoy lots of economies of scale by buying machines from Germany, Austria and Switzerland because they’ve been designed for use across the European railway network, and we’d get much cheaper machines as a result.

Also, if we can continuously improve those machines and adapt them to our more restricted access environment, they might be more interesting for other rail networks as they become busier.

As to who operates this expensive equipment, I think that depends on the business case and on the length of our relationship. We are moving more and more towards longer-term relationships with our suppliers, both for renewals as well as for enhancements. We went to a lot of trouble to make sure that there was good continuity and visibility moving from CP4 into the beginning of CP5, and that has worked out very well.

This forward visibility isn’t just for five years.

The control period process gives us a high degree of certainty over five years, but doesn’t mean we know nothing about the next five years. Of course it doesn’t. We know quite a bit about the following five years because many of the projects that are approved for CP5 are ones that will not be completed until CP6. So we can be reasonably sure when we submit the initial plans for CP6 that many of those projects that are in the middle of implementation will continue to be funded.

Alongside this, we have a long-term technical strategy that is shaping our view of how innovations should develop. The work that we did on the initial industry plan for CP5 went way beyond five years - it was a forward-looking plan of which CP5 was merely the first tranche.

Richard Parry-Jones, chairman of Network Rail, was in conversation with Nigel Wordsworth Renewals at Watford.

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Innovation conference gets bigger and better

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ith more than 200 delegates from over 90 organisations and 33 display stands, the Railway Industry Association’s sixth annual Technology and Innovation Conference on 18 and 19 March was a much bigger event than last year.

Introducing the conference RIA’s technical director Francis How reflected on the past twelve months being eventful for rail innovation with the formation of the Transport Systems Catapult. With some justification he felt that RIA had played a significant role in placing innovation at the forefront of the UK rail industry’s agenda.

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DAVID SHIRRES

Red, green, yellow or blue

Intelligent mobility

Delegates soon found that this year’s conference was to be more people-focused. Jonne Ceserani of Power & Grace led a number of highly interactive sessions for everyone to find out whether they had Red, Green, Yellow or Blue personalities. The serious side to this was that successful innovation needs collaboration from all types of people who need to be open to each other’s ideas.

For example your writer had always considered that rail capacity was constrained by signalling systems but was persuaded that train braking also needs to be addressed.

Speaking to Rail Engineer, Francis How advised that RIA felt this to be an important part of the programme as the way people act can be a significant barrier to innovation.

During this session those present were reminded that it was wrong to consider that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution concerned survival of the fittest. Illustrating the importance of innovation, he actually said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Towards Intelligent Mobility is the aim of the Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) as was recently explained in Rail Engineer (issue 111, January 2014). Its chief executive, Steve Yianni, explained how the TSC is encouraging a collaborative approach to developing integrated transport systems so as to meet the challenges of population growth, congestion and increased energy costs.

Most of the TSC’s current projects will use the improvements in digital connectivity that was the subject of a presentation by Mike Short of Telefonica. As an example of the exponential growth in data transmission, Mike advised that the data transmitted in one year’s operation of Telefonica’s 4G network was equivalent to the previous eight years of 3G operation.

The big increase in the use of smartphones will result in 80% of the UK population having one by the year end. Such phones are currently used for an average of 128 minutes per day.

Those who use such devices are also getting younger, as Mike illustrated by reference to a popular YouTube clip “A magazine is an iPad that does not work” showing a

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one year old trying to get a magazine to do the things an iPad does. All these factors have huge implications and opportunities for the rail industry.

Innovation in franchising Peter Wilkinson, director of rail franchising for the Department for Transport (DfT), believes that rail franchising has been a success. Passenger numbers have doubled since privatisation and 60% more freight is carried. He also felt that few, if any, railways operated so well in such a dense mixed traffic

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network. Nevertheless, he recognised that rail franchising had to change. For example, a major shift in the DfT’s thinking was that it now recognised that passengers had to come first.

The DfT also now believes that franchising has to foster innovation. As a result, the DfT is making it clear to bidders that quality and innovation is required. This requires new rolling stock as extending the life of the existing stock is not a clever strategy. Peter also felt that the railway was considered to be operating at full capacity only because of self-imposed constraints for which innovation is also required.

He announced that the DfT has created a ÂŁ50 million Innovation in Franchising fund. This will be available over the next three years for projects covering the East Coast, Trans Pennine and Northern franchises. It will fund innovative projects in these franchises that have a difficult business case or which may not deliver a commercial return during the franchise period.

Sharing experience David Johnson of DGauge shared his experience of developing an innovative product: a dynamic pantograph gauging technique that allowed restricted clearance tunnels to be electrified without excessive cost. His presentation considered the seven tripcocks of innovation to be: the innovative source; the business case; where does it fit; how does it relate to standards; what approvals are needed; what risk does it import and quadruple the time.

Describing innovation from a rolling stock leasing company’s perspective, Mark Hicks of Angel Trains described the short and long-term tensions between franchise period and operational life of assets. In doing so, he made the distinction between incremental innovation (LED headlamps) and driverless trains and, like many speakers, stressed the need for collaboration.

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PHOTO: BOMBARDIER TRANSPORTATION

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The pods at Terminal 5 For those using Heathrow, the pods at Terminal 5 offer a glimpse of the future today. Since May 2011, they have carried 950,000 people over two million kilometres of driverless operation at reliability level of over 99%. These pods carry up to four people and are part of a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system that provides on-demand transport with an average 10-15 second waiting time direct to the required destination.

Describing the system, David Marron of Ultra Global PRT explained how it could distribute people around busy congested environments at less cost with less disruption. The pods are battery powered and laser guided in a dedicated guideway. A central control manages the driverless system that can have four second headways, enabling it to carry around 2,500 people per hour.

David emphasised that, with this capacity, PRT systems are not intended to compete with light rail. Instead they offer ‘last mile connectivity’ at a cost of around 40% of the typical £20 million per mile for light rail infrastructure.

that Network Rail’s chairman, Richard Parry-Jones, had some fresh insights to offer the conference.

His presentation also echoed previous speakers such as the importance of starting with the customer and that there is “no room for work that is not collaborative”.

He felt that Network Rail faced four technical key issues: electrification catch-up; digital asset management; automatic traffic control and the signalling revolution for which it needed to learn lessons from other industries. For example, there are “many factory concepts that belong on the railway.” The industry also needed to imagine a future with free and infinite digital processing and transmission.

He could understand why railway engineers were nervous about the impact of new technology but felt this risk could be controlled with a robust technology introduction process. On the subject of workforce safety, he considered that this had to be improved and that there were safety solutions in the oil, gas and mining industries that Network Rail should adopt.

The chairman’s view

Looking back, moving forward

With his extensive experience at Ford Motors in product development and R&D, it is not surprising

David Clarke of the FutureRailway team announced that there would soon be one less

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acronym to contend with. EIT is to be dropped as his Engineering Innovation Team merges into FutureRail, a programme with a virtual team from Network Rail and RSSB which is working with industry to deliver the Rail Technical Strategy. It has direct funding of £125 million in CP5 which, with industrial match funding, gives £250 million.

The UK supply chain, which generates business worth £7 billion per annum, only exports 10% compared with 60% and 70% for the automotive and aeronautical sectors. FutureRailway aims to get the supply chain to meet the industry’s demand for innovation and as a result also increase opportunities for export into a global rail market worth £100 billion in 2010 and growing at 2.7% per annum.

To date, FutureRail had provided innovation funding of £30 million, matched by an equal sum from industry. This had been used for various competitions attracting a total of 300 entries, 75 days of testing at specialist facilities and demonstrators such as the independently powered EMU. In addition, support had been provided for DfT’s innovation in franchising.

Currently FutureRail has five live competitions, details of which can be found on its website. David also encouraged delegates to support the Young

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PHOTOS: BOMBARDIER TRANSPORTATION

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Railway Professionals’ event Next Generation Rail on 11-13 June.

The conference award As at previous conferences, a key feature was the RIA/ RSSB Innovation Award for which there were four finalists. Brecknell Willis presented their active pantograph proposal which is intended to reduce service disruption, allow high speeds with existing overhead equipment and provide real time monitoring of OLE. FLE structures described its idea for an OLE cantilever arm made from non-conductive material, thus eliminating the need for an insulator.

A previous winner, Park Signalling, introduced a proposal for remote condition monitoring (RCM) of signalling equipment not enabled for RCM - which is most of that installed on the network. This involved transmitting LED indications on printed circuit boards to a remote technician’s terminal, eliminating the need to visit the location concerned in order to diagnose faults.

Reliable Data Systems presented its proposal for a video train positioning system which analysed a video of track in front of the train to determine

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distance travelled. It can also determine the train’s location which can then be displayed on a track map.

Anson Jack of RSSB was glad to note that the delegate’s vote matched the view of the judges which was that this year’s RIA/RSSB Innovation Award, worth £300,000, should go to Brecknell Willis. As a result, the winner expects to produce a prototype of its active pantograph in 24 months’ time.

A further prize was the Mystery Shopper award for the best stand. This went to Thales for their display featuring advanced technologies yet to be used in the rail environment. These included precise positioning information which provides the exact location of individuals in hazardous environments. This works through walls and obstructions and its ‘Through-Wall’ radar technology can even detect the gentle breathing of someone sleeping in a room!

initiatives at the annual RIA conference which is now a ‘must attend’ event for anyone with an interest in this field. Through its conferences and unlocking innovation scheme, RIA is fulfilling a vital role to promote rail innovation.

Yet there remains much to be done. Informal discussions with suppliers revealed that commercial pressures remain a significant barrier to innovation. However, the oft-used word ‘collaboration’ indicates that this problem is recognised. A number of speakers challenged the premise that the railway was full and felt that those in the industry need to come up with radical solutions to the capacity problem.

The conference was certainly an education.

Charles Darwin’s comment in his Origin of the Species can be paraphrased as ‘innovate or die’.

With the competition now testing road trains of convoyed cars and driverless cars, this is a clear message for the rail industry.

Innovate or die

For more information, check out: www.shift2rail.org www.futurerail.org www.rruka.org.uk

As was made clear at this event, innovation is the only way that the railway can meet its 21st century challenges. So it is good to learn of worthwhile

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Innovation I

n World War 2, RAF bomber crews were formed by directing pilots, navigators, wireless operators, bomb aimers and gunners into a hanger. They then milled around until they arranged themselves into complete crews.

Forming teams by getting the right people in a room is also one of the aims of the Railway Industry Association’s (RIA) unlocking innovation workshops. Though in this case the process is a little more guided and involves different coloured hats, elevator pitches, bespoke software and networking stands. To inspire creative thinking those attending were asked to wear colourful clothes.

The most recent of these events was held at the Transport Systems Catapult (issue 111, January 2014) in Milton Keynes that has a 36,000 square feet centre which encompasses demonstration and visualisation studios, development labs, presentation areas and workspaces. This new centre offers a collaboration space for innovators, entrepreneurs, research organisations and businesses.

Opening the thirteenth such workshop, RIA’s deputy technical director, Jim Lupton explained how this event is part of the association’s Unlocking Innovation scheme, which seeks to help the UK supply chain overcome obstacles to innovation. The workshop did this by encouraging networking and helping those present to understand the opportunities for funding and collaboration. To help with this there were Innovations Angels in the room who were clearly identified by their yellow caps.

Elevator Pitches The idea of an ‘elevator pitch’, effectively to communicate an idea to a senior executive in a lift in around a minute, has been around since the 1980s. For this workshop, a slow-moving

lift was envisaged with two minutes allowed for a pitch to get across an idea and seek partners.

The fourteen pitches at this workshop covered customer focus, security, applications for specific technologies and support for innovators.

A large logistics company offered funds and expertise to support those with innovations whilst another organisation offered advice on advanced manufacturing technology. One pitch concerned RIA’s own Value Improvement Programme, which aims to improve supply chain efficiency through improved culture and behaviours with a focus on innovation.

The specific technologies for which rail applications were sought included passive cooling of large enclosures, the use of polyurethane, mobile surveying, free piston linear power systems, hydrogen fuel cells and

additive manufacturing. Security solutions were offered by two companies, including cyber security and electronic counter measures.

Customer focus pitches concerned projects to enhance the customer experience by enabling passengers to optimise their end-to-end travel options and to understand connectivity demands for security, train operators, retail and passengers. This last project recently won the Rail Exec Club’s ‘Most Interesting approach to train operations’ award.

Two of the pitches concerned light rail, one presenter offered the low cost light rail solutions needed if there is to be a significant expansion of light rail in the UK. Another asked for involvement in a proposed Very Light Rail Innovation Centre in Dudley which would have a 2.5 km test track.

To add further colour to the workshop, green hats were given to the elevator pitchers to identify them during the breaks when 200 people were milling around.

Funding the future Presentations from FutureRailway and Innovate UK (formerly the Technology Strategy Board) made it clear that there is a lot of money available. Indeed funding available over the next seven years for the EU’s Horizon 2020 research an innovation programme amounts to no less than €80 billion, of which €6 billion is ring fenced for transport funding.

Part of this is the Shift2Rail initiative which is a legal undertaking between Ec and rail sector companies (including Network Rail) who are jointly funding a one billion euros programme to boost five areas of rail innovation: rolling stock, control and signalling, infrastructure, customer service and freight. This can fully fund the development of innovations by its members and their sub-contractors.

DAVID SHIRRES

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RAIL INNOVATION David Clarke of FutureRailway used a four-quadrant graph of benefit and implementation difficulty to illustrate how innovations were encouraged.

For the low benefit side, the support offered essentially concerned guidance whereas funding is needed to support ‘high benefit / hard to implement’ innovations.

Competitions to address industry-defined challenges are a key activity in this regard. FutureRailway has two on-going competitions: ‘Reliable and Predicable Braking’ (closed 18 December 2014) and ‘Power Train’ (closed 2 February 2015). It is soon to launch competitions on degraded mode signalling and the digital customer experience.

In addition, the Rail Innovation Support Engine (RISE) has £1.8 million each year available to fund promising rail innovations that do not have to fall in a particular category. FutureRailway can also provide testing vouchers giving up to five days subsidised access to test facilities at Long Marston and Network Rail’s Rail Innovation and Development Centres (RIDC).

Nick Jones explained the role of Innovate UK, which is investing £400 million per annum in innovation of which £70 million is allocated to the transport sector. Innovate UK also sponsors competitions such as a cross-industry initiative to introduce aerospace materials to rail. Its ‘Small Business Research Initiative’ is intended to help the public sector access novel ideas which cannot be obtained through normal procurement challenge.

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Advice to access funding for innovations from FutureRailway, Innovate UK, Shift2Rail was readily available. To test participants knowledge of funding sources Jim Lupton ran a ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ competition immediately before the networking session.

One stand demonstrated Bridgelight, the network match-making software that RIA encouraged workshop participants to use to facilitate collaboration by matching capabilities and requirements.

During the networking sessions delegates were also able to sign up for advice sessions on product acceptance and intellectual property issues that could be a barrier to innovation.

An unusual aspect of the workshop was that, to aid networking, delegates were asked to ensure that their mobile phones were switched ON during the networking sessions.

Breaking out The workshop devoted a large part of the afternoon to a wide range of breakout sessions: » Passive solutions to control risk from London Underground’s curved platforms; » Guidance for SMEs on Horizon 2020 opportunities; » How companies can improve their ability to innovate;

Hats and stands The workshop had a generous amount of time for networking with the opportunity to speak to the innovation angels and elevator pitchers with their yellow and green hats. A dozen or so stands also provided a focus for networking. These stands included client organisations such as Network Rail and London Underground, organisations that promote innovation including FutureRailway and the Transport Systems Catapult, and those demonstrating specific technologies.

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» Mapping underground utilities; » Handheld devices to help blind and partially sighted users find their way around stations; » Prevention of ballast fouling from highway run off at level crossings; » Improved fault reporting on London Underground disparate data channels; » Developing Network Rail’s Rail Innovation and Development Centres (RIDC); » FutureRailway’s powertrain challenge;

A look at the last two topics will give an idea of the level of detail discussed.

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RIA technical director Jim Lupton speaks to an attentive audience.

Network Rail has two RIDCs. The Tuxford site (formerly known as High Marnham) is 10.5 miles of track, speed limited to 75 mph, is nonelectrified and non-signalled and has a purpose built OTP/OTM (on-track plant/on-track machine) test site. The Melton (formerly known as Old Dalby) site has 14.5 miles of track for use up to 125 mph and is electrified with both OLE and third/fourth rail. At both sites, track infrastructure can be modified as required and there are suitable workshops and offices.

Network Rail made it clear that the RIDCs must both meet the current needs of potential users and be developed to satisfy future requirements.

FutureRailway’s Powertrain challenge concerns the 3,000 self-powered vehicles, some of which date from the mid-1980s, for which there is significant scope for innovation to improve energy and cost efficiency as well as increasing reliability and reducing maintenance costs. The competition seeks powertrain solutions and sub-system innovations (for example energy generation and storage, power electronics and distribution systems) which must be fitted below the solebar and meet the required acceleration and duty cycles.

The competition is in two stages, feasibility and a demonstrator stage, for which respectively £750,000 and £3.65 million have been allocated. The competition closes on 2 February 2015 and it is expected that feasibility contracts will be let in March and a start will be made on the demonstrator stage at the end of the year.

End of the afternoon By the end of the afternoon there was no let up in the wide range of topics covered by the workshop with presentations on innovation in procurement and how FutureRailway is ensuring that the future will be delivered.

A joint presentation by Simon Addyman of London Underground and Danny Duggan of Dragados UK on their ‘Reconstructing Bank’ project demonstrated that innovation is not just about technology. This project faces significant constraints to reconstruct a very busy underground station which potentially affects 67 buildings, many of which are listed. At an early stage, it was recognised that the contractor’s contribution to the project’s business objectives outweighed the variance in construction cost between different contractors.

For this reason, an innovative procurement process was used that involved structured and protected dialogue with bids evaluated against business outputs which included capacity enhancement, journey time reduction, reducing construction disruption. The ideas adopted from the successful contractor included increasing journey time benefits by £148 million.

This approach also enabled the main contractor to be appointed early in the project. As a result, instead of the client, the contractor undertook the design required for the Transport and Works Act application. Early contractor involvement and extensive early 3D modelling to detect construction clashes is also reducing the time of the construction phase. As a result, both during construction and when the project is complete in 2021, Londoners will benefit from this innovative approach to procurement.

In a contrasting presentation, FutureRailway’s James Hardy explained how

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the future, as represented by the Rail Technical Strategy (RTS), was going to be delivered. After a quick rattle through the RTS he explained that the RTS was intended to be a “single version of the truth” to give the industry a definitive idea of the technologies that need to be developed to meet its future needs. This would be maintained using the web-based Sharpcloud visualisation tool which was being used to deal with the complexity of the RTS, present the underlying detail, and support cross portfolio programmes.

He then used the RTS’s Control, Command and Communication (CCC) theme to illustrate how significant programmes have been developed. A preliminary evaluation shows that, over 30 years, the CCC portfolio is expected to deliver benefits of the order of £7.1 billion for an investment of £1.5 billion. The development of the RTS portfolios in this way is being used to determine how best to progress the required projects as well as influencing innovation in franchising, European and academic activity. The unlocking innovation workshop at the IMechE on 30 June will have a fuller session on the RTS.

Next steps For anyone with an interest in railway engineering, RIA’s Unlocking Innovation Workshop is a fascinating event although its wide-ranging nature makes it difficult to immediately grasp all the topics covered. For a client with a specific problem or a supplier with particular solution or idea it is certainly the place to be.

The next Unlocking Innovation Workshop takes place on 22 April. Prior to that RIA members have the opportunity to attend the annual RIA Technology and Innovation Conference on 25 and 26 March. The theme for this conference is ‘Transferring Technology’ and it will include the 2015 RIA/Future Railway innovation awards of a total of £300,000 to develop railway innovations.

The need for railway innovation is clear and is reflected in the high level of funding available to support new technologies. RIA’s unlocking innovation workshops play a valuable role in this respect by ensuring all concerned are aware of the opportunities and getting the right people together. Who knows how many future innovations will result from connections made at these workshops.

Some helpful websites connect: home page of RIA’s Unlocking Innovation Scheme https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/unlocking-innovation-in-rail iHelp: Innovation in the GB Rail Industry http://www.webdoc.org.uk/ihelp/home.html Shift2Rail: European rail joint technology initiative http://www.shift2rail.org/ Bridgelight: network match-making software for workshop participants http://bridgelight.co.uk

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CHRIS PARKER

Testing trackbed stiffness URS won funding in the 2013 RSSB/RIA Innovation Competition to develop the RTST.

Trackbed samples are tested at URS' UKAS accredited laboratories.

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onsultant URS has a long and distinguished record in transportation asset management. Robert Armitage, URS’ UK director of transportation asset management, reflected on this at the recent launch of its new Rail Trackform Stiffness Tester (RTST).

The team’s origins date back to the 1990s when Scott Wilson (since acquired by URS) and the University of Nottingham established a joint company to capitalise on both organisations’ expertise in pavement engineering.

Originally focusing on highway and airport pavements, the company saw an opportunity to apply some of the investigation, assessment and design techniques from these fields to the rail industry. A trackbed technology team, which is now part of URS, was established to implement this idea.

Through its current framework with Network Rail, URS has delivered trackbed investigation and design services across the UK rail network for a number of years. This work informs Network Rail’s track renewal specifications on plain line, switches and crossings and enhancement projects.

The original pavement engineering organisation outgrew its offices at the University Science Park and moved some years ago to URS’ office in Chilwell, where the RTST launch event took place.

Measurement challenge The need to improve trackbed stiffness measurement techniques is recognised in the Railway Technical Strategy, which sets out a long-term vision for the country’s rail network. International research also shows that poor, non-uniform stiffness has a direct influence on track deterioration and, in extreme cases, can lead to derailments.

URS has responded to these challenges with the RTST which delivers safety, operational and productivity improvements compared to previous industry methods. The new machine also gives an improved measurement of layer stiffness, allowing for better assessments of the causes of trackbed failure and compliance with specifications.

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RAIL INNOVATION URS developed a full-scale trackbed to validate the RTST and use in future research.

At the recent launch event, Robert and his colleague Dr Matthew Brough, URS’ operations director for transportation asset management, looked at the history of trackbed asset management in which URS has played an important part. Matthew is well qualified to discuss this as he leads the URS pavement, trackbed and materials consultancy teams. He is also a member of the Track Stiffness Working Group chaired by Network Rail, which aims to better understand track stiffness as well as its measurement and impact upon the network.

understand the behaviour of the track in those areas. FWD was also used to establish critical velocity, an important speed limiting parameter on railways at which dynamic interaction causes enhanced track deterioration. However, the time taken to get the FWD apparatus into rail mode and onto the track meant that it was cumbersome and its effectiveness as a track asset information tool was limited.

Another step forward

It all started with the FWD URS’ market leading trackbed asset management service began in 1992 when the company introduced the falling weight deflectometer (FWD), already in use in the highway sector, into railway asset applications.

The FWD is used to establish the layer stiffness of a highway pavement structure, a property that is of critical importance in assessing the pavement’s condition and ability to sustain the loadings that it needs to carry. The stiffness of a railway trackbed is of equal significance and the innovation was to adapt the FWD used for highway investigations so that it could also be used in rail applications.

In 1996, a team of trackbed specialists was established to undertake rail trackbed investigation, design and asset management consultancy. The team produced another key innovation around this time. Up to this point, the standard method of checking the nature and condition of trackbed materials below sleepers had been to excavate trial pits in the four foot and visually examine what was present.

This approach had limitations in terms of the information obtained, and also suffered from

obvious problems with regard to health and safety and speed of execution.

The URS team conceived the idea of the Automatic Ballast Sampler (ABS), a methodology that takes core samples by driving sample tubes down through the ballast into the track formation and subgrade. The samples so obtained are then examined, logged and sub-sampled for further testing under laboratory conditions.

Trial holes and ABS samples obviously only gave trackbed information at the specific discrete locations where the sampling was done. To interpolate between those locations something else was required. Ground Probing Radar (GPR) was the solution, as it enables the identification of layers or strata within the trackbed. Since the nature of each layer can be identified precisely at each ABS sample location, the GPR data allows the engineer or technician to follow the layers through the trackbed from ABS location to ABS location.

The FWD was used to obtain ballast, subballast, formation and subgrade stiffness to support the ABS and GPR data in helping to

URS introduced its ‘Total Route Evaluation’ methodology for trackbed asset management in 2002. This methodology collated all trackbed data with bespoke track-quality metrics, enabling trackbed maintenance and renewal decisionmaking to be based upon performance rather than condition.

The Mast Operated ABS (MOABS) followed in 2012. This improved site worker safety and increased the efficiency of the trackbed sampling process. The new device effectively automates the driving of the ABS sampling tube, removing the need for a human operator to hold the pneumatic hammer. It incorporated winching and jacking systems for lifting heavy equipment and for withdrawing the sampler from the trackbed. All the apparatus was carried on a rail trolley for ease of site access and MOABS gained full Network Rail product acceptance.

These developments left the FWD behind and opened the way for further innovation. URS had the required ideas and saw an opportunity in the form of the RSSB/ Railway Industry Association (RIA) Innovation Competition. In 2013, the company submitted proposals for its RTST and was successful. Its proposal was joint winner and an award of £200,000 enabled URS to design, build and test the RTST.

URS' Matthew Brough explains the principles of machine operation and measurement.

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URS' MOABS system was demonstrated at the recent event.

The competition judges recognised the operational, technical and health and safety benefits of the RTST and its huge export potential, as well as the industry need for developments in this field.

Andrew Broadbent, RSSB head of research and development, commented: “URS’ Rail Trackform Stiffness Tester is a major step forward for surveying different trackbeds for railways in Britain and potentially, beyond. We’re delighted to have provided the financial injection and support to URS as the 2013 winner of the RSSB/RIA Innovation competition.”

RTST launch event Andrew described the research and development activities of the rail industry and the importance of the work of innovative companies like URS. He described how RSSB supports R&D through a range of programmes funded by government and industry.

There were demonstrations of both the MOABS and RTST in URS’ trackbed test facility. This comprises a full-scale trackbed constructed to Network Rail specifications alongside development of the RTST in order to validate the new technique against existing processes. It was very convincing to see the MOABS in action, showing how much quicker and safer it is than the old ABS system.

The RTST is a clear improvement on the previous industry technique. The whole apparatus is mounted on a transport frame that can move along on rubber-tyred caterpillar tracks and then switch to rail wheels, both systems being hydraulically powered and braked. When positioned correctly, easily achieved with the umbilical cord control system, the loading beam is lowered onto the test sleeper, the array of geophones is positioned onto the ballast and the falling weight is dropped to apply the load to the trackbed.

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The technique is able to replicate the loading requirements of high-speed or heavy-haul lines through the use of an increased range of pulse-loading conditions on the RTST. The weight is fully enclosed within the machine, which greatly minimises safety risk. The geophones measure the deflection response of the ballast, sub-ballast, formation and subgrade enabling the assessment of layer stiffness. With further analysis of the time history response of the subgrade, critical velocity can also be established.

Each test is very quick to perform. Added to the fact that the ‘on-tracking’ and ‘offtracking’ of the machine each take around 15 minutes, compared to about two hours for the old rail FWD, the speed of operation means that far more track measurement work can be undertaken in any given track possession than was possible with the FWD. This should mean that it is now feasible to take trackbed stiffness measurements more widely than ever before, greatly assisting the understanding of track asset condition and the monitoring of its changes over time and under traffic.

A tour of URS’ UKAS accredited laboratory facilities followed. These are extensive and comprehensive, enabling the company to offer a wide range of testing of materials from highways, airport pavements and rail tracks. Tests include chemical contamination analysis or physical properties, fatigue tests and more. Bespoke test machines developed

by URS, such as the Springbox and Aggregate Flow Test, have been used for a variety of applications including accelerated ballast deterioration testing and the assessment of stoneblower aggregate performance. URS also has laboratories for testing asphalt and bitumen - materials that can potentially be applied to rail as asset owners look to asphalt tracks as future trackform solutions.

Unlocking Innovation Jim Lupton, RIA deputy technical director, is spending a significant proportion of his time managing the Unlocking Innovation scheme, which runs regular workshops for industry clients and suppliers to share their challenges and solutions.

With widespread recognition that innovation is the key to improving the UK’s rail system, Jim is keen that initiatives like the RSSB/RIA Innovation Competition continue to support research and development for companies such as URS. Commenting on URS’ success, he said: “It is inspiring that in just 18 months the prize helped develop a concept into a fully-functional rail mounted test machine with significant client interest. We are very pleased to have helped make this happen and it shows the value of the work that RIA, RSSB and others are doing to help innovators access support.”

The RTST is now market ready and will be deployed to various test sites over the coming months. URS’ Matthew Brough explains: “We already have a number of UK projects secured for the RTST and have also received enquiries from overseas rail operators. We are using our new test facility for other projects that will further research trackbed stiffness and its influence on track performance. If the industry moves towards a performance based specification for track renewals, we see the RTST as the best machine to give the required stiffness data for compliance with Railway Group standards. The RTST can also give rapid method of assessment and post remediation validation, supporting infrastructure owners as they increase the remediation of formation below track. We also see potential markets in slab and asphalt track evaluation, as the machine has the capability to measure a range of trackforms. I would like to thank the Track Stiffness Working Group, RIA and RSSB for their ongoing support in making this happen and TekCo for a quality design and build service.”

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Polyurethane slab track

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NIGEL WORDSWORTH

ld bridges. What can you do with them?

They are expensive to replace, costly to maintain, often difficult to access and can cause problems such as speed and gauge restrictions. Masonry arches are worst.

They suffer from spalling, bulging and general dilapidation. To cure their ills very often takes stitching, bracing, sheathing, anchoring or sleeving. All have their benefits, and their problems.

And some bridges are listed, so you can’t do any of that - at least not cheaply.

So masonry arch bridges are a problem.

Network Rail has 25,000 of them. Many are over 100 years old, one of the oldest being the Whiley Hill bridge on the Stockton to Darlington railway.

It’s not a very exciting bridge to look at, but it was built in 1824 by George Stephenson, making it one of the oldest railway bridges in the world.

Venerable structure While George Stephenson was a forward thinker, even he didn’t predict freight trains running at 80mph with 25 tonne axle loads over his bridge. So he hadn’t calculated for those stresses. The bridge has done a good job of

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The polyurethane fills only 20% of the voids. coping with them for 190 years, but it was getting a bit tired.

Fortunately, those clever people at Balfour Beatty had been working with more clever people at Heriot Watt University on a solution to just such a problem. The answer was not to uprate the bridge at all, but to make sure that the loads it was experiencing were no higher than those it was designed to withstand, all those years ago.

Most railway track in the UK sits on ballast which is basically a bed of stones. As each stone can move in relation to its neighbours, although that movement is restricted to an extent by the interlocking of the sharp edges of the individual pieces of ballast, the force of a passing train goes almost straight down into the trackbed, and then into the structure under the track - the bridge.

There is a bit of spreading of that load through the ballast, so the loading is actually in the shape of a pyramid, but not much.

What is needed is a way to spread that load, to make the base of the pyramid larger, so that the point loading on the bridge is reduced. If it can be spread enough, then the bridge will be able to withstand it in its current condition, removing the need for all that expensive remedial work.

And it’s not just the expense. A major bridge reconstruction involves closing the railway, and the road underneath, and inconveniencing a lot of people.

Unifying ballast So what did all of those clever people come up with?

They developed a way of turning the loose ballast into a more unified structure. That doesn’t mean sticking it together, that’s been tried before.

Glue is usually hard, and somewhat brittle.

Sticking pieces of ballast together means that there is a lot of point contact, which causes high stresses, which breaks the glue, and you are back to square one.

The answer is to use a two-part polyurethane.

This fills up the voids between the stones, turning the whole thing into a homogeneous mass.

Now back off the amount of polyurethane until it only fills around 20% of the voids. That is enough to stiffen the ballast, but it means that the track still drains normally through the remaining 80%. It also makes the whole system more flexible - still able to spread loads but also resilient enough to withstand the shock loadings of a passing train.

The trick is to apply just the right amount of the

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right grade of polyurethane, in just the right place.

After a lot of testing in the laboratory at Heriot Watt, the new product, now named XiSPAN as it was a derivation of the XiTRACK ballast reinforcement that has been used to bind damaged track together for some time, was ready for its first practical application.

Dermot Kelly, Balfour Beatty Rail’s senior project manager in charge of the development, explained the process. First of all, the quality of the existing ballast was checked, and found to be poor. So a large vacuum excavator was brought along to the roadway under the bridge, pipes run up, and the whole lot sucked away leaving the track propped up on jacks.

Fresh ballast was installed, up to 200mm below sleeper base. The polyurethane compound, mixed in the nozzles, was then pumped onto the ballast.

It soaked away and then gelled about 15 seconds later.

More ballast was added, up to sleeper bottom, and the track aligned and tamped. Story Contracting provided the plant, and 1stinrail the track team.

And that was it. Job done. George Stephenson’s Whiley Hill bridge is good to go, if not for another 190 years, at least for some considerable time.

25 tonne axle loads. Once the correct grade of polyurethane had been formulated, the system was ready to go into the tunnel.

Once again the current ballast was in poor condition, so that was all removed. The existing rails and timber sleepers were retained - there are some interesting sleeper lengths in the tunnel due to its particular geometry.

Fresh ballast was brought in, and the track relayed in the usual way. Once all of the gauging checks had been completed - it is impossible to use a tamper - then the polyurethane could be applied. First of all the shoulders were treated, creating an edge beam which would retain the track. Then the ballast was excavated between the sleepers down to the level of the sleeper bottom and the polyurethane poured in, effectively consolidating the ballast from sleeper bottom downwards.

Finally, the top level of ballast was replaced.

All of this took just four Saturdays, and Toadmoor tunnel has now effectively been slab tracked. What is more, it is a resilient slab that drains as well as conventional ballast and which dampens vibration - which makes it superior to a concrete slab in some applications.

So what next for XiSPAN?

Troublesome tunnel So what next for this interesting new technique?

Well, there was Toadmoor tunnel. It’s another George Stephenson design, but is a little bit newer it was only built in 1840. Just 128 yards long, it runs through an unstable hillside near Ambergate north of Derby.

With an elliptical bore, the tunnel is twin track.

There is an invert under the track, tapering down to a low point in the middle of the six foot.

Due to tight clearances, the depth of ballast under the track is kept to a minimum. This means that, although there is an adequate amount in the six foot, there is almost nothing close to the tunnel walls. This arrangement causes its own problems - settlement in the middle and crushed ballast at the edges.

A model of the tunnel was built at Heriot Watt and tested at a simulated 80mph with

XiSPAN won Balfour Beatty Rail the Heritage Award at the 2014 Network Rail Partnership Awards.

Stephenson’s 1824 bridge at Whiley Hill.

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Flash of inspiration STUART MARSH

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t’s an odd fact that some of the best inventions are based on the simplest of ideas. We might look at some brilliant new solution and wonder why no one thought of it before. But then, perhaps they did?

Sometimes the real trick in problem solving is in bringing together old ideas. A valuable new addition to Network Rail’s arsenal of plant machinery makes use of a very old technique… with some added oomph!

Nothing added Forge welding has been used to join metals for millennia. Blacksmiths since ancient times have been familiar with the technique of heating metal parts to a high temperature and then hammering them together. In today’s techno-speak we might term this a solid-state diffusion process.

Importantly, the result is a welded joint that comprises only the original metals, with no fillers or bridging materials. Since the industrial revolution, this method has been superseded for convenience by gas and electrical welding - processes that add material. This added material may have different physical and chemical properties to the metals it joins.

The welding of railway lines might seem to be a modern idea, but continuous welded rail (CWR) has been used in the USA since the late 1890s. Here in the UK, though, it didn’t find favour until the 1960s. Welding techniques and the rails themselves have improved steadily over the past five decades, but aluminothermic welding remains the most popular method. Molten iron produced by an exothermic chemical reaction is cast into a ceramic mould that surrounds the rail ends. In other words, metal is added to fill a gap. An advantage is that no complex or heavy equipment is required, but great care needs to be taken to eliminate voids and slag inclusions. Even a perfect alumino-thermic weld has properties that differ from those of the rails themselves.

Sparks fly during the forging process

Saving time The time available for track maintenance and renewals is ever-more-constrained by the drive to increase capacity on the rail network. Accordingly, in Control Period 4, Network Rail made a commitment to order ten Mobile Flash Butt Welders (MFBW). Finance came from the £220 million seven-day-railway fund, established to support schemes offering substantial improvements in network availability.

The MFBW equipment uses an electric current to heat up the rail ends, which are then hydraulically pressed, or forged, together. Sean Heslop is Network Rail’s programme manager for rail services (Network Operations Delivery Services).

As he puts it: “It used to take up to four shifts to fix a defective rail because of the time it took to weld and stress the new sections of rail in the short midweek possessions that were available.”

Rails are normally delivered to site in 216 metre lengths where they have to be stressed - stretched to the length they would be at 27°C - and welded together to form CWR. “We knew there was a piece of equipment out there that could deliver this work in a fraction of the time,” said Sean. “But there were a lot of problems with older types of MFBW. They couldn’t do the stressing job and there were also issues with them interfering with the signalling and telecommunications systems.” The equipment was also large and difficult to transport. With Network Rail undertaking approximately 60,000 welds per year (2012 figure) there is clearly a need for MFBW equipment that is self-contained, fast to operate and easy to move from site to site.

Road/rail The MFBW solution now being adopted by Network Rail marries the latest K945 flash butt welding head developed by Holland Company of Illinois, USA, with a modified Doosan DX170W wheeled excavator. An on-board Marathon Electric Magnaplus three-phase generator, powered by a Deutz V6 diesel engine, provides the electricity for the boom mounted welding head.

The vehicle’s rail controls are managed through the GOS ‘Rail Safe’ Canbus system which controls the rail lighting (four white and four red LED sets) complete with auto directional switching, auto horn sounding when the machine starts to move, speedometer, extra boom services and extra working lights. GOS Engineering, based in Blaenavon, is also responsible for fitting the Holland welding equipment and its computerised control system.

The first machine was delivered in 2012 and four are now in service. Another six machines are undergoing approvals.

Added stress

The Holland K945 welding head

RIA Innovation 2015.indd 20

Flash butt welders have been used on the UK rail network for about 15 years, but the key advancement now is in the ability of the new equipment to stress the rails as they are being welded. Using the new machines, up to 600-metres of track can be re-railed, stressed and welded in a single eight-hour possession.

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Previously the whole operation could take up to four shifts.

Stressing and welding can be accomplished in-track, from the lineside, or from adjacent lines. Safety check-valves fitted to the boom cylinders even allow the MFBW to be operated under live overhead lines. The three-piece offsettable knuckle boom also allows rail welding to be undertaken with the adjacent lines open to traffic.

When stressing is involved, there is a waiting time of just eight minutes from completion of the stress weld - primarily the time taken for the rail weld to cool to below 400°C. With the alumino-thermic welding process, this waiting time is 30-minutes.

Rail Engineer was recently invited by Network Rail to view an MFBW machine in action on the High Marnham test track. The time-saving benefits were obvious, but Bob Hervey, Network Rail’s project manager for the MFBW programme, was keen to highlight the other important benefit.

“Flash butt welding offers better performance and fatigue strength than alumino-thermic welding,” he commented. “Because no material is added, the rails and the weld are homologous. With no resultant hardness differences and the virtual elimination of inclusions and flaws, these welded joints can be bent and flexed in the same manner as the original rail.”

21

Working together, the MFBW and clipper machines make an impressive team, typically giving a completion time from burn-in to fully stressed and clipped up of less than two hours.

The Holland computerised weld management system calculates the required starting rail gap and tonnage required to achieve the correct degree of stressing for a given rail temperature and rail profile. Sensors within the weld head measure distance, current, voltage, temperature and pressure in order to control the welding process. There is continuous monitoring and recording as the weld progresses, plus an analysis of the completed weld. The results are stored in a database and historical weld data can be viewed either as a full report, or a one-line summary.

Forged Using the MFBW, the stressing and welding process itself takes just two minutes, meaning that a defective rail can be changed in less than one hour.

Once the rails have been aligned and clamped in the welding head a pulsed AC current of typically 600-700 Amps (800 Amps peak) is passed through the rail ends to heat them. When the rail end temperature has risen to 800900°C, hydraulic rams bring the rails together with a typical force of about 40-50 tonnes (100 tonnes max). It is this movement that can be used to simultaneously provide the rail stressing.

During the forging (or ‘upset’) process, a further 27mm of rail length is lost.

The excess metal is squeezed outwards and this flashing is trimmed off when still soft by a shear die that closely corresponds to the rail profile. Once cooled, the railhead can then be ground to a perfect finish.

Creating a loop to pull back the rail end

Pull back There is an alternative method for stressing the rail, which Bob Hervey was keen to show us during the High Marnham demonstration. It offers a further saving of time when replacing short lengths of rail, as only about 90-metres of rail needs to be unclipped. The freed rail is then barred into the four foot to form a loop. Cut lengths of scaffold pole act as runners to reduce the manual effort involved. The loop creates the rail end gap needed for the stressing and welding process. Again, the on-board computer system calculates the exact gap required. As the weld is made the unseated rail is pulled back into position with the correct tension.

A key feature of the butt welding process is the need for one rail to move. The technique cannot therefore be used for welding within switches and crossings, but it is suitable for all other rail welds.

Network Rail has negotiated terms and conditions with the trade unions so that its own staff can run and operate the MFBW machines rather than making use of contractors. Two teams of five men are assigned to each machine, geared to delivering seven shifts per week from a base of 250 shifts per year.

Simple is best The Rosenqvist CD501 high output clipper

Unclipped The maximum rail pull for stressing is 900-metres of unclipped rail. Working alongside the MFBW on the High Marnham test track was a Rosenqvist CD501 high-output clipper. This self-propelled machine, produced in Sweden, is designed to work with Pandrol Fastclips and SHC clips. It will unclip or re-clip 900-metres of rail in 25 minutes. By hand this would take an eight-man team about two hours to complete.

RIA Innovation 2015.indd 21

The MFBW initiative makes use of a simple idea, albeit with a high degree of precision and control. As Bob Hervey put it: “The craftsmen who fashioned medieval Samurai sword blades would recognise the principle of what we’re doing.” Simple in essence perhaps, but Bob cannot hide his enthusiasm for the benefits of this system, not only because of the time and track access savings it provides, but also because of the increased performance of the welds themselves.

“Even the worst flash butt weld is superior to the best alumino-thermic weld, which we’ve been relying on for the past 50 years,” he said.

In view of the 60,000 Thermit welds undertaken each year on the network, the deployment of these new MFBW machines seems set to revolutionise rail welding within the UK.

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Rail Survey technology reaches new heights

N

etwork Rail and the various infrastructure contractors are in a high risk business. They have to plan work on assets that are not fully understood, there is increased pressure on project overruns and to manage and reduce health and safety issues, all necessitating more complex project management. They are having to come up with more and more imaginative solutions to the problems faced procuring or bidding for new work, delivering construction projects and maintaining key assets.

New technology The stakeholders on all projects are searching for the following four objectives: » greater efficiency (reduced cost); » less risk (especially Health and Safety); » quicker project times; » fewer track closures.

A recent post on a LinkedIn forum seems to support these findings and sympathise with those involved: “Rail infrastructure managers find themselves in a dilemma. They have to maintain the infrastructure to ensure its safety and reliability, while keeping the track as available as possible. They also have to optimise the use of their resources and contractors to keep costs to a minimum.”

The initiatives to support these key objectives are varied but represent a step change for the industry. Instead of palliative solutions aimed at reducing the symptoms (such as working longer shifts and reducing margins) there is now an increasing use and adoption of technology to tackle the real causes.

Where technology assists is with an increasing adoption of photogrammetry to create life-like images of topology. Large, high, remote or inaccessible structures can be filmed using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or ‘drones’) and the images used to create 3D models for surveyors to use for condition assessment. This can be done prior to a bid or as part of a risk based maintenance assessment.

LiDAR is increasingly being used to create pinpoint 3D measurements of land, tunnels and viaducts. This is coupled with a technology to convert the

But how can technology help?

One of the companies involved in helping contractors to understand what they are being asked to do is the Bionic Group. The London-based multi-media animation specialists for the construction and rail sector have worked directly with Network Rail and supported over 1,000 projects with the network’s main contractors. Having been working in the construction industry for 14 years, the company has amassed a wealth of experience. This shows that there are three main fundamentals to any major project: better information, improved communications and a reduction in human interaction.

Information The better an asset is understood, the more accurate an invitation to tender (ITT) can be created and the more precisely a proposal can be crafted. The traditional method for understanding assets is through surveying. In addition to human interaction (see later) the output of a survey is often subjective and in the form of a fixed report non re-usable or transferable.

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Sequence showing the transformation of LiDAR Cloud Point Data into usable solutions such as BIM models and Virtual Reality for driver simulations.

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23

Remotely Piloted vehicle for rapid & safe data capture.

terabytes of data into pin-point accurate 3D models, often overlaying the use of photography to add texture and realism.

One example of the use of this technique is to create fully-immersive 3D models of new routes for signal location work and driver training. The results from this work can also be used to create BIM (building information modelling) models which have an obvious re-use.

All of this activity is entirely in keeping with Network Rail’s asset management strategy which defines, as an objective of its core principles, “optimising decisions and planning based on risk principles, robust principles and innovative methodologies”.

Whilst the introduction of these technologies is underway, the demographic is uneven. Some organisations have no capability while others conduct full LiDAR, cloud-point data processing in-house. There is no dominant player to go to today and often a solution would necessitate some in-house capability and a number of different sub-contractors/suppliers. These are indications of a young, emerging market which will, in all probability see a number of mergers and acquisitions over the next few years.

Communications The re-usable material created by the above technology-assisted surveys is highly visual. This can greatly assist in the creation of method statements which are immediately usable, easy to understand and unambiguous for all

An animation commissioned to illustrate the installation process of the new electrification of the HOPS plain line track - from survey through to vibro piling, structure installation, cabling and testing.

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project stakeholders. Poor communication of ‘the story’ is cited by project managers as a prime reason for project delay. The same output can be reused again for public consultations and/or even dispute resolution.

Here the picture for adoption is equally fragmented, with the default position being a reliance on paper. The more enlightened (and more efficient organisations) are comfortable with using 3D method statement videos, with time lines, as the primary communication for project teams.

Interaction A direct benefit of using unmanned vehicles to place cameras close to assets is the obvious reduction in ‘boots on ballast’ and, often, surveyors on ropes. Although there are obvious limitations (no tactile examination capability), the unmanned camera approach provides a fast method to determine just how much, if any, of a given asset requires closure for human inspection or costly out of hours work.

Surprisingly, the number one bugbear from contractors is not cost or time scales but the complexity, time and cost involved in satisfying Health and Safety obligations. Here, technology is massively reducing potentially-risky human interaction with the rail network.

Bionic Eye So the primary move seems to be around ‘asset information’, gained with the minimum of human interaction and impact to the track. This data can then be leveraged and re-used in everything from bid support to maintenance approach. It’s a methodology that is easy to summarise but difficult to execute.

To assist, the Bionic Group has recently launched a specialist technology division aimed at bespoke solutions for rail survey and asset management, the Bionic Eye. This uses unmanned vehicles (aerial, ground and cable) and bespoke camera rigs to transmit highly accurate and interactive data to surveyors - the BE.3DAM solution.

The Bionic Eye mission is to be at the vanguard of the use of this new technology and processes - the ‘leading, but not bleeding’ edge of technology - and to use remote vehicle use to provide obvious and quantifiable benefit to contractors on the rail network.

For more information, visit www.thebioniceye.co.uk

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y g r e n e U b reak M t hrou D gh

RAIL INNOVATION

DAVID SHIRRES

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DMU Energy Losses Edinburgh to Dunblane

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The 60,000rpm Flywheel

11%

Rolling Resistance Drag

16%

Transmission

52%

Alternator Losses

16%

Braking

5%

A

t 100 mph, the energy in a 133 tonne three-car Class 170 DMU is 133 Megajoules (MJ). Braking the train from this speed to a stop in two minutes is equivalent to powering 1,100 one kilowatt electric fires over this period. It is therefore not surprising that a study of the stopping service between Edinburgh and Dunblane (ten stops over 42 miles) showed that braking losses accounted for 52% of the energy use. A further 16% was lost due to transmission slippage during initial acceleration, a significant factor for stopping services.

Flywheels are not a new rail technology.

Indeed, Richard Trevithick’s single cylinder steam locomotive of 1804 had an 8ft diameter flywheel to ensure that it would not stall. More recently, the Class 139 Parry People Mover, introduced in 2006, uses an 86hp diesel engine to charge a 500 kg flywheel of one metre diameter rotating at maximum speed of 2,500 rpm. This demonstrated that it was possible to carry 50 people for 15 miles on one gallon of fuel, compared with two miles for a conventional DMU. The Class 139 is a lightweight vehicle weighing 12 tons with a maximum speed of 40 mph at which its energy would be 1.9MJ as compared with 133MJ for a class 170 at 100 mph. So, whilst the Class 139 shows how a flywheel can be successfully used on lightweight vehicles, a different solution is needed for conventional DMUs. Ricardo flywheel.

To reduce these losses Ricardo, Artemis Intelligent Power and Bombardier are working collaboratively on an innovative project named ‘DDflyTrain’ in which each contributes their technology and expertise.

With such large potential fuel savings on offer, Rail Engineer was keen to learn more.

Using braking energy Recovering energy lost during train braking is not a new idea. In 1903, the trams at Devonport used the Raworth system of regenerative control to use energy generated from braking to power other trams on the system. In 1933, the newly-electrified Transcaucasus Railway used regenerative braking to retard trains on their descent from the 949-metre-high Surami Pass.

Regenerative braking in the UK dates back to 1954 when it was used on the Manchester to Sheffield line through Woodhead tunnel which was electrified at 1,500V DC. Descending coal trains on this steeply-graded line provided power to other trains climbing to the summit.

For DC electrification, it is relatively straightforward to feed power from retardation back into the supply as this only requires the retardation voltage to exceed that of the supply.

For AC electrification, regenerative braking is a relatively recent development as there is also the requirement to synchronise phases. With modern

electronics, regenerative braking now features on almost all electric traction.

In contrast, regenerative braking of diesel powered trains is almost unheard of. With no external power supply to accept the energy from braking, re-use of this energy requires rapid ontrain storage of large amounts of energy whilst the train brakes. Although batteries could store this amount of energy, they can only charge at a slow rate. In contrast, super capacitors can accept energy at a high rate but have a low storage capacity. This would seem to rule out electrical storage.

If re-use of braking energy is to be a practical proposition for diesel trains, a new technology is required. A recent innovative project has shown that flywheels could well provide the answer. A further advantage is that, unlike batteries, the cost of additional energy storage using flywheels does not scale with capacity. For example, doubling the capacity increases cost by a factor of 0.3.

Table 1 Typical properties of Energy Storage Technologies

Energy Storage (Watt hours per kg)

Rate of energy transfer (Watts per kg)

Lithium Ion Battery

175

L300

Nickel Metal Hydride Battery

90

600

Supercapacitor

20

3500

Flywheel

120

5000

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In 1915, Sir Harry Ricardo established Engine Patents Ltd specialising in automotive innovation.

The company is now known simply as Ricardo, and one such innovation is its flywheel technology which has now been used on Formula One cars, buses and excavators (to recover energy as the load drops). Such applications require relatively small, high-speed flywheels. With stored energy being proportional to speed squared, a flywheel spinning at 60,000rpm can store a significant amount of energy.

Such flywheels require Ricardo’s advanced bearing technology and need to operate in a vacuum to minimise losses. This would normally require seals and a vacuum management system.

The Ricardo system avoids this through the use of a magnetic drive through the vacuum chamber wall. A magnetic field couples permanent magnets in the flywheel shaft to those in the outer rotor through static pole pieces in the vacuum chamber wall.

This drive is the result of a seven-year development programme. It is more efficient than a mechanical drive and also provides a useful gear reduction making the output shaft speed one sixth that of the flywheel. It is comparable in concept to an epicyclic gearbox with the pole pieces acting as planet gears.

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RAIL INNOVATION

Efficiency [%]

100%

TC slip mode

Digital Displacement

Fluid coupling

50%

0 0

20 mph

1000

2000

Speed [rpm]

Digital Displacement Pump

3000

Current DMU transmissions suffer from significant energy losses. The study that highlighted a 52% loss from braking also showed transmission losses of 16%. Current DMU transmissions have two-stages: a fluid flywheel which allows slippage as the engine accelerates, and a fluid coupling to provide a fixed drive.

As a result, mean efficiency during acceleration to 20 mph is around 30%. Such low efficiency would not be acceptable for a flywheel system that recovers energy during this initial acceleration.

The solution to this problem is provided by Artemis Intelligent Power, a company created at the University of Edinburgh in 1994. The company specialises in innovative projects for its Digital Displacement® technology which is based on concepts that were originally developed by the University’s Fluid Power group. In 2009 it was overall winner of the Carbon Trust Innovation Award in recognition of the benefits of its technology to wind turbines and to transport. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries also recognised these benefits and acquired Artemis in 2010.

In a Digital Displacement® pump of, say, six cylinders, each cylinder’s low pressure poppet valves remains open throughout the cycle unless activated by a solenoid. At idle, the cylinder valve remains open and oil flows freely through the pump with minimal energy consumption. At low power, solenoids for one or two cylinders are activated by the digital output of the pump’s controller. These cylinders operate at full efficiency whilst other cylinders idle. All solenoids are activated at full power, at which time a Digital Displacement pump is over 90% efficient.

Where to put it?

The third company involved in the DDflyTrain project is Bombardier, which has the task of ensuring that this novel technology can be successfully retrofitted to a DMU. This includes compliance with all relevant standards, a mechanical interface for energy transfer and the effect of shock and vibration. For this, an RSSB publication on the vibration environment for rail mounted equipment was used to assess the best orientation of flywheel spin axis. Systems integration also needs to consider how the DDflyTrain’s braking and power is blended into existing control systems. To avoid taking vehicles out of service, the energy recovery system is designed to enable individual component parts to be progressively fitted overnight.

Simulations, vehicle space constraints and cost benefit analysis has shown that the optimum power train transmission is 2 x 4.5 MJ flywheel units each with its own Artemis pump/motor coupled to a single pump/ motor that drives the main transmission. One reason for this is that containment of two 4.5 MJ units is more practical than a single 9 MJ unit. The 4.5 MJ flywheel has an outside diameter of 0.28 metres, mass of 21 kg and spins at up to 45,000 rpm.

Testing and Certification At Artemis’s Edinburgh test lab, a test rig for the DDflyTrain will soon be operation which will enable the

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energy recovery system to be tested under all simulated operating conditions. This will test how the Ricardo flywheel and Artemis pump/motor operate together and will measure round-trip efficiency to validate the system’s business model. With experience from this testing, it is intended that a prototype will be fitted to a DMU in 2015. After a year’s trial, the intention is for fleet introduction in 2017.

The safety review process is being led by Bombardier and has been discussed with the Office of Rail Regulation. A key aspect is proving the flywheel, which is made of filament-wound carbon fibre, to be safe if it fails. Ricardo’s experience is that its failure mode is de-lamination resulting in rapid but progressive deceleration as candyfloss-like material rubs the chamber wall.

To test for other failure modes, flywheels will be proof tested to 90,000 rpm and subject to destructive testing. In addition, for the foreseeable future, full containment will be provided in the form of a steel cylinder with ‘horse shoe’ cross section that can spin on its own bearings to dissipate energy. This is a significant design constraint.

The prize The benefits of the DDflyTrain depend on the mode of operation and frequency of stops. If the flywheel only is used for initial acceleration, less fuel is used, creating less noise and vehicle emissions. Alternatively, simultaneous use of engine and flywheel power could give a DMU an initial acceleration comparable to an EMU with consequent journey time savings. In addition to commercial benefits, this could free up capacity on electrified lines and might enable a particular service to be operated with fewer trains.

In fuel-saving mode, Ricardo estimate a typical fuel saving of around 10-20% on services such as

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Edinburgh to Dunblane. This gives around £11,000 per vehicle per annum savings with a 4.5 year payback period for an estimated system costs of £50,000. Volume production of flywheels for rail and other application might lower this cost.

The project is developing a predictive tool to determine savings for a particular train service to assess the system’s payback for any train service which will be validated as part of the testing regime.

Whether used to speed up trains or save fuel DDflyTrain is a potential game-changer offering significant savings that could transform the economics of DMU operation.

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to promote specific initiatives. In 2011, the TSB announced its ‘Accelerating Innovation in Rail’ competition and prior to its launch held a ‘Consortia Building and Information Day’ In April 2012, the TSB announced that the Artemis/Ricardo/Bombardier consortium was one of the winners of this competition. Since then, much work has to be done to produce hardware that is ready for testing so that, in a few years’ time, spinning flywheels under DMUs could be delivering fuel savings worth millions. Then, if your DMU goes quiet leaving a station, you’ll know why!

Innovation by match making The collaboration between Bombardier, Artemis and Ricardo to develop their DDflyTrain could ultimately make regenerative braking on diesel trains as ubiquitous as that on electric trains. Whilst this is an impressive story, also notable is the match-making that brought these three diverse companies together.

Rail Engineer reported in September 2012 (issue 95) on how the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) was promoting crossindustry innovation.

This included the creation of Knowledge Transfer Networks to bring together businesses, universities and research organisations and competitions

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Batteries included E

lectric multiple unit number 379 013 looks perfectly normal. It may be a tad cleaner than a few around the network and the interior is suspiciously immaculate. It may have a few more yellowjacketed folk crawling over it on occasions. But otherwise, there’s nothing to differentiate it from any other of this rather handsome Electrostar class made by Bombardier.

The lights are bright. The doors open and close.

In the brisk East Anglian air of mid-winter it is comfortingly warm inside with the gentle click of heaters and the background hum and hiss of air conditioning. It can be seen trundling up and down between Harwich and Manningtree as a perfectly normal train on a normal passenger train service. (And that’s Harwich as in ‘Harwich for the Continent’ proclaimed by the famous LNER holiday posters– leaving Frinton for the incontinent.)

To the fare-paying passenger there really isn’t anything out of the ordinary. It starts and stops normally. It makes EMU-type noises. It trundles effortlessly along at 60mph. Their journeys are uneventful.

But, having expended over a hundred words extolling its normality in an article which is meant to address railway engineering, there must be something odd about this train.

Added IP The only clue that there is something unusual going on is the position of the pantograph. As the train goes on its daily routine, the pantograph is... down.

It’s an EMU, running under the wires and yet it is not connected to the overhead power supply – and there’s no third rail either!

There is another clue though and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what it means.

Emblazoned on the sides of the unit are the words, “batteries included”. What else do you need! Perhaps we should have started there.

Yes, this is an EMU with added IP. It’s an IPEMU – Independently Powered EMU. And the independent power comes from eight tonnes

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of batteries positioned under the frame of the motor car. Unit 013 has been quietly running in passenger service since 12 January this year as part of proving trials to validate the whole principle of independent power using battery technology. So far it has proved itself to be eminently... ordinary.

Passenger expectations The idea of sticking batteries in a train isn’t exactly new. London Underground uses battery locomotives. Battery trains were used in ammunition dumps to avoid the possibility of sparks. But none of the applications so far have addressed that minor issue of passenger comfort and passenger expectations in the twenty-first century. The punters want to be warm (or cool), they want good lighting, doors that open, toilets that flush, air-conditioning that works and they couldn’t care less what powers it all. The draw on power in a modern train is considerable and a class 379 EMU is one of the heavier users of power – hence its selection for the trial.

GRAHAME TAYLOR

We’ll come on to the actual engineering in a moment, but it’s worth looking at why this train exists at all. Why bother? What’s the point?

Well, there is little point if all the train can do is sit in a station and spin its air-conditioning fans.

It needs to do considerably more. The aim of the current exercise is to have a unit capable of sustaining all the hotel loads and to do a round trip of at least 30km without running out of puff.

With that sort of performance being a reality, a number of intriguing scenarios start to play out. Non-electrified branch lines linked to an electrified main line can benefit from electric stock and even from through services. Sections of non-electrified railway that link electrified lines can become part of new through services. Depots no longer need to be wired. Unit maintenance can be carried out without the need for isolations or special overhead precautions. Routes which are prohibitively expensive to electrify because of infrastructure constraints can be partially electrified with the dead sections no longer an obstacle to electric trains.

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Risks and gains mismatch In the past, perhaps the easy solution – and indeed the only solution bearing in mind previous battery capabilities – was to build, run, maintain and fuel diesel units. But about 66% of diesel units are more than 20 years old which means that there is a bow wave effect for replacement. What to do?

Build more diesel units? Or perhaps keep building electric units which have the capability of being modified to take an independent power source?

This whole exercise is not about a special build of special units. The exercise on the Harwich branch has involved an ordinary EMU - so ordinary that hardly a new hole has been drilled in it. As we’ll see in a moment, this has been more about ‘hole drilling not being permitted in someone else’s train’ rather than a desire not to drill. It’s been a good discipline though.

The current structure of the railways is not sympathetic to the development of an independently-powered train. After all, looking at who gains and who takes the risks reveals a complicated and awkward mismatch. The company that might gain from a new passenger flow will have a finite franchise length. The maker of batteries will need to spend a great deal on development work. A rolling stock manufacturer needs a firm contract. The testing of trains to full approval involves a huge number of interfaces.

Who is likely to take up the challenge and take the risks – in the off-chance that the idea is practical? After all, this isn’t part of a normal gentle evolutionary process often found in the development of a product. This is a step change – certainly for the railway industry.

Cross-industry collaboration The whole exercise has been an example of macro cross-industry collaboration with rolling stock ownership, maintenance and operation all lying with separate companies.

It’s been where Future Rail in a collaboration between Network Rail and RSSB has been able to deliver the project by supporting the whole industry - both the supply chain and those that operate the trains on a daily basis.

As David Clarke, director of innovation at the

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RSSB, puts it: “Research is relatively inexpensive, but the costs involved at the next stage of piloting and demonstration can be vast. And this is true in any industry. What we are about is de-risking innovation through demonstration.”

The trial running of the IPEMU in passenger service has been the culmination of a complex process coordinated by the project team which has representatives from Network Rail, RSSB, DfT, Bombardier, Valence, Abellio Greater Anglia and Future Rail.

After some initial work on the concept, vehicle performance simulations were commissioned along with battery performance design and testing in parallel with detailed stock conversion design. A Class 379 was selected as it was only four years old and already had dual-voltage capability. Network Rail let a contract to Bombardier for this part of the work along with the physical conversion which was followed by performance testing at Bombardier’s test track in Derby and then at Old Dalby.

Existing timetabling The limitations have been formidable. The remit is to produce a train capable of delivering a passenger service to an existing timetable. This means that the range needs to be at least 50km (30 miles) travelling at speeds generally between 60mph and 100mph. The acceleration should emulate that of an existing DMU – something like 0.5m/s² so that it can keep up with existing timetabling.

Incidentally, the acceleration of the Harwich EMU was certainly respectable although obviously fairly restrained for an EMU. The expectation from an EMU seems to be much greater than for a DMU. Diesel acceleration is accompanied with a great deal of noise and general fuss. Take away the noise, and diesel acceleration isn’t quite as impressive.

The Duty cycle is pretty demanding too. 30km on batteries followed by 50km on OLE. The achievements so far? James Ambrose, principal engineer working for Network Rail and the guy project managing the whole exercise, is upbeat.

“The range has been 77km (48miles). Speeds have been as-planned as have all the other parameters

29

with the battery life still on-track to deliver five years – which ties in with the normal EMU heavy maintenance overhaul schedule.”

How many batteries?

Counter-intuitively, the batteries are not large.

The basic building block is a 3.2v lithium ferrous phosphate cell manufactured by Valence. Each one is about 3” long. There are 12 cells connected in series to make a row. 33 rows are then connected in parallel to give a 38.4v battery. 20 batteries are connected in series in a pod to give 768 volts. Two pods are connected in parallel to make a 768volt module and finally, three modules are connected in parallel in a 768v battery raft. Two of these rafts are slotted neatly under the frame of the motor coach in a space formerly occupied by auxiliary batteries, giving about 450 kW.hrs of capacity. Do the maths. There are an awful lot of batteries!

Why are the basic batteries so small? It’s all to do with heat dispersal. Too big a battery would lead to more heat being generated and the need to engineer a way of getting rid of it. This has weight and space implications – neither being available in the limited envelope of the train.

Free your mind...

Despite the doubts and doubters, despite the industry structure, it has been proved that independent power using batteries is a practical proposition. In March of this year the updated Route Utilisation Strategy will be published. It will acknowledge that IPEMUS could be used on some parts of the network, so avoiding costly electrification schemes and promoting new patterns of passenger services.

Free your mind of previous restraints. Branch lines might need just 100 metres of electrification at the buffer stop ends to recharge batteries.

Electrify just the heavy gradients. Through electric trains between Manchester and Cardiff – not impossible. Retain a core electrification unit that drip-feeds schemes piecemeal across the network instead of having peaks of expenditure followed by famine. The prospects are intriguing and, despite its seeming normality, the IPEMU is just the start...

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RAIL INNOVATION

Listen to the station!

PAUL DARLINGTON

I

magine using a train and a strange, busy station on your own if you are unable to read the signs and unsure of where you need to go.

Network Rail has been involved with the trial of a possible solution to help customers who are partially-sighted or blind to make end-to-end journeys involving rail.

As part of the Reading station redevelopment, Network Rail was keen to make sure the station was as user friendly and as accessible as possible for all customers. Part of this work involved working with Guide Dogs on the design of the station. Formally called The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, Guide Dogs provides mobility for people who are blind and partially-sighted and also supports research into technology to assist such people. The work at Reading involved signage, tactile paving, audio announcements and braille maps. As part of its consultation work, Guide Dogs also introduced Network Rail to the Microsoft Directional Audio trial.

The system A team from Guide Dogs, Microsoft and Future Cities Catapult was testing a system on a sample journey from

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Reading to London encompassing walking routes, shopping, bus and train travel. A small headset is paired with a Windows Phone application and uses cloud-based location and navigation data.

This works with a network of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi beacons to create a personalised Microsoft soundscape transmitted through the wearer’s jawbone.

The application helps both orientation and navigation and also provides enhanced contextual information, such as points of interest and additional journey details, to help the user build up an understanding of their surroundings.

This information is transmitted through boneconducting technology, which means that sounds appear to come from outside of the user’s head.

For example, if there is a coffee shop on the user’s right, ‘coffee shop’ will be read out from their right, allowing them to build up a mental image of their surroundings.

The headset is a modified pair of AfterShokz headphones that hooks over the wearer’s ears and rests on their jawbone, transmitting sound to their inner ear using vibrations. This means that the wearer can hear sound from the headphones and from their environment simultaneously as the headset does not cover their ears. As a result, users are very aware of their surroundings giving them the confidence to make their own decisions rather than just be guided by a pre-recorded script.

On the back of the headset there is a small 3D-printed box containing a Bluetooth receiver and transmitter, an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a compass, and a GPS chip so that the user’s position can be tracked. The user selects a destination using their smartphone and the headset provides audio cues - it emits a continuous pinging sound when the user is following the correct route and a swishing noise if they wander off-course. It can

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also inform them when they reach junctions and issue verbal directions.

Buttons on the headset allow access to more-detailed or historical information about specific points of interest. So, for example, on passing a town hall, a press of the button will find out when it was built and what is happening there.

All information is sourced from Microsoft Bing.

Microsoft’s audio technology means that the sound is directional, so if the attraction in question is several metres ahead to the right, the sound will appear to come from that direction. Each headset is tailored to the user’s unique specification, to create a model of their head. This helps to enhance the quality of sound placement.

The Bluetooth beacons are matchbox-sized and for the trial were battery operated. For accuracy within buildings both Wi-Fi (802.11) and Bluetooth

(802.15) devices are used. The Wi-Fi communicates directly with the smartphone, with the blue tooth beacons communicating via the headset and then to the smartphone. Supporting information, such as on those points of interest, is pulled through a combination of Bing and/or processed on the Azure cloud platform as necessary.

Bing is the Microsoft web search engine and Azure is a cloudcomputing platform created by Microsoft for digital applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centres.

Reading station and Network Rail Network Rail started to work with this new technology in September 2013. It quickly became clear that there was synergy with the trial and the Reading station development

as the technology could easily be installed as part of the station programme. Network Rail enabled the station part of the end-to-end journey by providing a Bluetooth route through the station from the ticket barrier to the platform. This involved installing hard-wired Wi-Fi devices and Bluetooth beacons along the route.

For the trial at Reading, eight Wi-Fi devices and twelve Bluetooth beacons were installed. Network Rail worked with Microsoft closely on a daily basis to move the devices and beacons around the station to get the best positional location and communication links possible. The system was subject to extensive testing and set-up by Microsoft over a three-week period to understand the signal strength and triangulation. The application developers, located in Seattle, USA, were involved in refining and modifying the system for a station environment. Once it was confirmed a success, the system was announced in November 2014.

All of the journeys made by blind and partially-sighted people during the trial were made with the back-up of a sighted person being present.

Phase 2 Feedback from users was very positive, and the evidence from phase 1 will be used to make a safety argument and validation for a standalone phase 2. This will look at how the technology, and a large number of mains-

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powered beacons, can be installed throughout the station, not just for wayfinding but also for beneficial supplementary contextual information regarding retail outlets, waiting rooms, refreshments and additional journey details.

Even retail staff may be provided with Bluetooth beacons so that partially-sighted people know where to obtain assistance to help them through a station.

Looking to the future.

The long-term ambition for this audio technology is to bring other organisations and local authorities across the UK on board. Then more people living with sight loss, or anyone living in a city, can benefit from its services. With two million people in the UK already living with impaired vision, the potential impact of this kind of project is great. The ability to travel independently can significantly affect a person’s ability to have a social life and their ability to get a job.

It is possible that the technology could be used to enhance the usability of stations for all customers and not just the blind or partially-sighted. Complex, busy stations are not the easiest places to find one’s way around and can be very off putting and intimidating places, in particular for the occasional user of rail transport.

Anything that can be done to make rail travel easier and more attractive is welcome.

We would like to thank Matthew Jackson, senior programme manager, Thames Valley Area Infrastructure Projects, Stations and Civils, Network Rail, for his assistance with this article.

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