Rail Industry Focus

‘ We can design parts that never fail ’

Network Rail chairman Richard Parry-Jones gave a wide-ranging speech at Railtex covering technology adoption, research and development, and whether the organisation’s debt is sustainable. It’s well worth a read – here’s his speech in full.

It's very exciting to be here, because we’re surrounded by engineering and technology and innovation, and it reminds me of the same thought that’s occurred to me since I took on the role at Network Rail – we are in a land of huge opportunities.

I spent about 40 years in the automotive industry, and so far about 15 months in the rail industry. So, there’s a slight imbalance in the depth of knowledge I have about the two forms of mobility and transportation. But nonetheless it does give me some interesting, and I would argue fresh, perspectives on some of the transferable lessons learned that can be applied – in both directions, not just in the direction of automotive to rail, but also from rail to automotive. And of course [there are] some interesting interfacing opportunities between road transport and rail transport to further optimise the interaction and particularly the safety of the two operations, which are all enabled by technology.

The resurgence of UK rail

Let me start by talking about the economics. The good news is that we work in an industry that, after eight decades of decline, is now growing again. In the last decade, passenger growth grew by 50%, and last year by almost double digits.

Most sectors in these very difficult economic times would be extremely jealous and envious of the situation that rail finds itself in in this country, and indeed rail in the UK distinguishes itself in the fact that it grows faster than rail in most other developed countries. DB is not enjoying the rates of growth that we are here in the UK.

You have to ask the question, why? Why has this reversal taken place? And there are probably many reasons. Certainly the congestion on the roads and the cost of motoring has contributed. But also, there’s a macro-economic trend towards people clustering; more and more people are living in cities and urban centres.

Of course, that’s where mass transportation and railways – a spectacularly effective solution – work at their best, getting people around inside congested cities and getting people from city to city.

It works really well because, with a high schedule, you can load each movement with a high passenger number, whereas of course with a more distributed population it’s much more difficult to do that because of all the fixed costs in place, and therefore other forms of transport are more competitive.

The third major reason is the performance of all of you people in this seminar, and your colleagues and partners. Because the customer service has improved and performance is what makes the difference. Customers, although you might not believe this reading some newspapers, are actually buying our ‘product’ more and more. They’re voting with their wallets – hopefully in the future they’ll be able to buy smart tickets with their wallets, but for now they’re buying with more conventional means! – and they’re voting for this form of transport in greater and greater numbers.

Investment and debt

That’s really good news, and gives us an opportunity. It also means that all three political parties are really behind investing in railways. There’s a broad consensus across the political spectrum and therefore it’s unlikely that plans to invest in the railways will be disrupted by changes of government. It’s possible, but unlikely. Most people see the economic value, the social value, and the business value of investing in the railways in the UK – therefore, after decades of underinvestment, we’ve started to invest and catch up on the under-investment of the past and at the same time start to invest in enhancements and expansion of capacity to meet this demand. That’s really good news: the problem is that much of that money comes from borrowing from the national bond market against our asset register. That’s great for awhile, but I don’t know if it’s ultimately infinitely sustainable. We need to think about: how do we continue to improve the profitability of the railway system? How do we continue to reduce the subsidy? It’s already down by 50% versus 10 years ago, it’ll come down again by another half in the next control period, if our bids are accepted. We should continue to drive up revenue and drive down cost so the industry becomes more and more attractive to invest in.

How are we going to do that? That brings me to why we’re here and at this particular exhibition. It’s all about technology. How are we going to deploy technology to radically change the costeffectiveness and yield of the railways?

Data, technology and R&D

What are the opportunities? I see in this hall – I’ve had a chance to have a quick look around – a huge number of opportunities. We have put in, as part of our strategic business plan, a bid for an extra £300m of R&D money for the industry – not for Network Rail on its own – to allow us to take advantage of all the opportunities that exist to apply much more mechatronics, to digitise the operations of the field.

One example: we should have one datapool. All the players in this sector should collect all their data in one pool, then run apps that will allow us to see each other’s data and allow us to make our operations more effective.

There are many other technologies we could adopt. Points haven’t really changed – the actuation has, but not the fundamental mechanism – in 50 years. When did you last hear about an aircraft landing gear that failed? And when did you last hear about points that failed? This morning! It’s time for a new points design! One that is failsafe.

That requires investment upfront. It also means looking at the understructure for points. 80% of all points failures are driven by geometry failure of the underlying substructure. Replacing these ballast areas in high-intensity junctions is impossible, because it requires such a long blockade that we would disrupt the travelling public to an unacceptable degree. What about some innovative technologies to be able to replace that ballast using pre-fabricated techniques and fast piling techniques in much shorter times than currently?

A revolution in asset reliability

I could go on for the rest of the morning about all the opportunities. But I want to move onto reliability. It’s no good investing in new technology if it’s not reliable.

If I compare the reliability of the hardware of the assets we have on this network and indeed on other railway networks, it’s nowhere near good enough. Aerospace and automotive to name but two are much more reliable. We need to start adopting some of modern, robust, reliable engineering techniques in this industry. Those of you already doing it – email me!

I believe, from what I’ve seen so far, that this is a huge opportunity. Improving asset reliability using modern engineering techniques and also new technologies is a key way of improving the uptime of the railway.

It’s by no means the only way. Fundamentally, we need to put more trains on the tracks – and have less empty spaces on the tracks that are not earning revenue. But we do have a disproportionate customer dissatisfaction when we have an asset failure. It’s not all about just achieving 92.5% PPM. Customer satisfaction is actually much more affected by excessive delay and a large range of delay. And that is usually caused by asset reliability failures. That’s why we need to attack that with a new urgency and a new level of expectation of ourselves as an industry.

I invite partners within the industry to work with us on that.

Extracts from the Q&A session

Parts that never fail

“My point is to try to encourage people to adopt a different mindset. Not the mindset of ‘for 150 years we’ve had points, and they’ve always failed, and we’re getting better at maintaining them and they fail less’, but rather, we’re going to adopt the approach the Japanese adopt with the car industry. We’re going to design bits that never fail. ‘Oh, that’s impossible, you don’t understand Richard, you don’t come from the rail industry’. Excuse me – we can design parts that never fail. But we have to decide first of all that that is what we want to do. And not give ourselves a whole list of excuses for why it cannot be done.”

Technology implementation

“We need to look at other industries and learn from them how they safely introduce new technology faster than we have been able to do. We’ve been a little bit technology shy – and there are great exceptions by the way, I’m not one to blacken everybody with the same label, there are extremely good examples of excellent, outstanding technology already in the railway industry.

“I’m talking about the area under the curve, which needs to be much bigger, which is why we need to adopt much more disciplined technology readiness gateway-driven processes, so that when we introduce new technology, you’ve done as much work as you need to do before putting it through the implementation hopper.

“At the moment, there’s too many times where, despite our aversion to technology, external events force us to take risks when adopting new technologies, but because we haven’t done the upfront R&D, we’re not ready, so we’re busy inventing some of the solutions in the middle of project implementation. That is not the right way to run an industry.”