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Passenger safety: Respect the edge

27.11.18: Claire Coward, communications lead at the RSSB, discusses her organisation’s latest passenger safety campaign. Incidents at the platform train interface (PTI) account for almost half of the total passenger fatality risk on the mainlin...

Monitoring the performance of earthworks

27.11.18: Dr Joel Smethurst, associate professor in geotechnical engineering, and Professor William Powrie, professor of geotechnical engineering, both of the University of Southampton, discuss the work and research that’s helped the rail sector in...

Introducing iPort

20.11.18: Steve Freeman, managing director of iPort Rail, introduces the UK’s newest inland freight terminal. The UK’s newest inland rail freight terminal for 10 years – iPort Rail – is now open and operational. It is ano...

Maintaining light rail

20.11.18: Dr Adam Bevan, Professor Paul Allen and Professor Jay Jaiswal, of the Institute of Railway Research, take a look at new rail asset management techniques in light-rail systems. The defining characteristics of light-rail systems – such...

dessan Design in the digital railway

20.11.18: Denise Watkins, business development manager at Hitachi Information Control Systems Europe (HICSE), discusses her organisation’s exciting new railway signalling design tool, dessan Design. HICSE may appear to be a relatively young org...

Challenging the perceptions of rail

13.11.18: Darren Caplan, chief executive of the Rail Industry Association (RIA) explains how the RIA Rail Fellowship Programme is challenging people’s view of rail.  We are living in an age of significant public cynicism about rail. The ti...

Data-driven rail

13.11.18: Andy Cross, director of Elastacloud, and Lucy Bealing, from the Elastacloud Rail Centre of Excellence, discuss their innovative collaboration with Porterbrook to deliver data-driven railways. The march of progress has an unequal tempo acros...

Looking ahead to the Williams Review

13.11.18: Darren Shirley, chief executive of the Campaign for Better Transport, takes a look at the government’s root and branch review of the rail sector. The secretary of state announced in September his intention to launch a review of the ra...

20 May: What really happened

06.11.18: Dan Brown, director of strategy and policy at the ORR, walks us through the first part of the regulator’s inquiry into the timetable chaos that ensued earlier this year. On 20 May 2018, a new timetable was introduced which plunged rai...

Digital Railway: All change on the ECML

06.11.18: Network Rail route programme director, Toufic Machnouk, explains why only a radically new approach to contracting will deliver a better service for passengers. Network Rail’s current search for a train control partner to renew train c...

The future of rail investment

06.11.18: Paul Sheffield, vice president of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and ICE State of the Nation steering group chair, discusses his organisation’s report on the future of investment in the rail sector. Rail continues to be a ke...

Balfour Beatty hails successful use of digital evidence platform on GWR programme

30.10.18: Balfour Beatty has praised a new secure data collection platform as an ‘amazing development’ which has created seven-figure cost savings over 12 months on its Greater West electrification programme. Called eviFile, the software...

Crossrail 2 in the context of a national strategy

30.10.18: Now that Crossrail is nearly complete, Professor Sir Tim Besley, commissioner at the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), makes the case for Crossrail 2. London is a city synonymous with innovative infrastructure. The capital has prosp...

Grayling's review can get rail devolution back on track

30.10.18: Jonathan Bray, director of the Urban Transport Group, states that the government rail sector review offers the opportunity to put control of the railways back where it belongs. Last month, the government launched what it called a ‘roo...

The Railway Test Facility

30.10.18: John de Bono, research fellow at the Nottingham University’s Nottingham Centre for Geomechanics, sheds a light on their Railway Test Facility. The University of Nottingham’s Railway Test Facility is a full-scale experimental fac...