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Challenging the perceptions of rail

13 November 2018Darren 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 timetabl...

Data-driven rail

13 November 2018Andy 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 across indu...

Looking ahead to the Williams Review

13 November 2018Darren 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 railways...

20 May: What really happened

06 November 2018Dan 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 rail pass...

Digital Railway: All change on the ECML

06 November 2018Network 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 control...

The future of rail investment

06 November 2018Paul 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 key part...

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

30 October 2018Balfour 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 as a s...

Crossrail 2 in the context of a national strategy

30 October 2018London is a city synonymous with innovative infrastructure. The capital has prospered on the shoulders of great pioneers of engineering such as Marc Isambard Brunel and Sir Joseph Bazalgette, responsible respectively for the first Underground rail...

Grayling's review can get rail devolution back on track

30 October 2018Jonathan 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 ‘root and...

The Railway Test Facility

30 October 2018John 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 facility...

Northern Powerhouse Rail: The need for change

18 September 2018Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) will be transformational for the north – it will change the way people live, work, and play. It will rebalance the UK economy, and also make sure the north can take full advantage of the opportunities HS2 will...

Innovation through people and technology

18 September 2018Ian Prosser, HM chief inspector of railways and director of railway safety at the ORR, picks out the key industry challenges to focus on based on the regulator’s most recent annual health and safety report. In the ORR’s most recent an...

Why we all must mind the gap

18 September 2018Clair Mowbray, chief executive of the National College for High Speed Rail (NCHSR), explains how we can all ensure the UK’s next generation of talented engineers are not only equipped with the skills necessary for major infrastructure projec...

3D printing: from virtual to real

11 September 2018Like so many other technological advancements, 3D printing has moved from being the stuff of science fiction, through niche industrial application, to increasingly becoming a common industry tool and even a reality in the home. David Shipman, inno...

Repoint: A way out of the perfect storm

11 September 2018The Repoint project was originally created to examine capacity constraints at junctions. But fast-forward seven years and the radical scheme has completely changed every aspect of the track switch as we know it. Sam Bemment, senior research and de...