Rail Industry Focus

A site to behold

The F2A project, aimed at improving capacity on the Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace route, is the first major rail scheme to make use of Mission Room technology, which allows planners, engineers and track workers to see a 360° view of the site from inside the project offices. RTM heard more from Network Rail’s Ian Grant, Balfour Beatty Rail’s Adam Stuart, and Mission Room’s Dr Bryan Denby.

When it comes to planning, there is nothing like being out on site to really understand what a project involves – at least, until now.

Network Rail and Balfour Beatty Rail, who are delivering the F2A project to upgrade the Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace route via platform extensions, freight lines conversions to make them suitable for passenger traffic, improved signalling and line speed and the addition of new crossovers, are making use of a new technology that offers an immersive experience of a work site without needing to be there at all.

Seeing it all

Mission Room involves video footage being taken of the site, but instead of being displayed back on a flat monitor, it can be experienced from inside a ‘cube’ with visualisations on all sides, giving a much better idea of exactly what is out there.

Network Rail F2A project manager Ian Grant told RTM: “Mission Room enhances the visualisation, without a doubt. That was the first comment we got back from people – that being able to see the complete circle of visualisation enhances the brief.

“So, if for example, you’re going to explain to somebody what work environment they are going to be in on Saturday night, then you take them in the week before, or before the shift starts, and you can actually ‘teleport’ them to site. You can take them to the workplace so they can visualise it as if they were standing there in a particular position. You can then identify the hazards on the site very clearly.

“If I was in the cube, for example, I’d be able to point at a hazard and it wouldn’t just be explaining that this is a hole in the ground or a live piece of wire – you’d be able to visualise it as well, which in the past you couldn’t do. You can do certain things with pictures, so you can put a picture up on a monitor screen and say ‘this is live’ but actually you get a much better feel if you have a 360° view of where you are.”

Balfour Beatty Rail’s project director, Adam Stuart added: “Introducing this new technology obviously involved an investment of time and resource at the start of the project to capture all the footage but we were confident that the efficiencies it would deliver further down the line would outweigh this initial investment.”

Grant said the F2A project was particularly suitable for using Mission Room technology because the line is in an urban area with lots of complicated lines and isolations. He added: “This was an interesting project in complexity but it was also good timing, because its start coincided with the technology being at its best and ready to be used.”

Lots to learn

Network Rail and Balfour Beatty Rail have been working on the design-and-build contract since May 2011, with work beginning on site from Christmas 2011 – and it was at that stage that Mission Room was used for the first time.

The technology is designed to be customisable and ultimately left to clients to run themselves, rather than as a service that would need constant external involvement from Mission Room staff.

The company’s managing director, Dr Bryan Denby, said: “The F2A installation was the first in the rail sector, so we were learning as they were learning. For the first few months we were refining the technology, while they were understanding how best to utilise it, and we’ve moved to a point where things have settled down a bit now.

“It is just like any technology – you have to plan how you are going to get the best out of it.”

Grant agreed, telling us: “To start with, getting our heads around the technology was something that involved moving into an area where no-one has any training, but it is very straightforward technology. We get given a camera: we take the camera to wherever we want to take some footage, whether we want moving footage or whether we want static footage: it is very simple.

“You press the button to get the four cameras working and the footage is started. You take the footage you want and you start utilising it.

“In the early days, it was clear to us that we weren’t really sure what we were going to use the footage for, but we quickly learnt lessons. It has a range of functions, whether it be a safety function, a planning function, or for a review of operations.”

Immersive experience

RTM asked what the engineers and track workers on site had made of the technology – whether they had been impressed or like to think they’ve seen it all before.

Grant said they’d certainly seen the benefits and Denby added: “It is all about the immersive nature of the experience: being able to understand how something to the left of you relates to something to the right or behind you is one of the key elements Mission Room gives you.

“Its very visual nature means it, as far as we are concerned, is the next best thing to standing on the real site, and you get the benefit of not having to travel, and the cost and logistics benefits of that. You can do it as you want.”

Safety is another key factor: it allows something to be inspected without putting people at risk any more than necessary.

Grant said the system is also of real benefit to planners; instead of constant site visits and walk-throughs, they will use the Mission Room.

“So they’d be able to travel through areas where we’ve got footage and they can go through their plans to re-emphasise what they thought was there or double-check certain logistic parameters.

“We’ve used it in incident investigation as well; to go ‘back in time’ to have a look at the state of a piece of infrastructure, using previous footage, to be certain it was how we thought it was.”

Stuart added: “Being able to view and inspect the infrastructure from the safety of the site office has been a key benefit for us. By removing the need for physical site surveys we have been able to reduce the risk of people working in close proximity of the operational railway. Having safe virtual access at the touch of a button has also allowed us to go back and double check the smallest details without the time and cost implications of re-visiting the actual work site.”

Denby said: “If everybody understands and everybody has the same mental picture of what is going to happen when they go out on site, and the planners have gone through and planned where the materials are going to go and the access points, and so on, then it should logically make the operation better, more efficient, and mean fewer mistakes. Mistakes are very costly in the rail sector.”

The footage also means there is less chance of conflict at the end of a project because there is visual and time-stamped evidence to refer to at all points.

It can also help with stakeholder engagement: for example, on the F2A project, First Capital Connect staff were given a better insight into the works that were to take place using the Mission Room, and there are potential future uses during planning consultations too.

Lights, camera, action

Asked how often the team actually has the camera out on site, recording new footage, Grant said: “There has been a lot of activity to get through, to get footage of all the locations; all the site access points and all the stations, for example. That’s involved travelling through the infrastructure, up and down the three-mile stretch of line, just to ensure we get all the base footage. Now it is more strategic footage being picked up; when we know, say, that in 12-16 weeks time we are going to be moving to a new area of the worksite.”

Denby added: “That’s a key lesson that is being learnt. The technology was introduced right at the start of this project, but in an ideal world it probably should have been introduced a little bit earlier to enable that background data to be picked up earlier. That way you can hit the deck running; I think there was a little bit of catchup here simply because the technology is new, it wasn’t available and the project was only made aware of it quite late on in the planning cycle. Ideally, you’d probably be using Mission Room six months to a year before the project is going into its operational phase – using it as a planning tool.”

The technology – shortlisted in the ‘safety’ category at the recent Network Rail Partnership Awards – is likely to be seen on other rail projects soon, Denby said. It can also be used in other ways, on a lesser scale than the full 360-degree ‘Arena’ experience – there is a ‘Mobile’ option, utilising a trailer containing similar facilities, or a more traditional screenbased approach using a wide, IMAX-like screen, for example.

Denby said: “We have given a number of highprofile demos to senior people within Network Rail, so we are hopeful. It takes time to establish a technology and people will be looking at Finsbury Park as a pilot project to see how it goes, but everything looks promising.”

The F2A project itself is about 30% complete, with many infrastructure upgrades having been done in the Finsbury Park area in time for the Olympics, including around half of the S&C renewals and associated signalling modifications, and around 30-40% of the civils works, such as bridge reconstruction.

Post-Games, the focus will shift more to the Alexandra Palace end of the site.

After two big possessions at the start of the works – a 54-hour possession at Christmas and another at New Year – the team have been working during 24-hour weekend possession windows.

From December this year, passengers will start seeing the benefits, when the platform extensions should be complete.

Grant explained: “The operational flexibility has increased now, so we have crossovers installed that can give signalmen better flexibility if something goes wrong. Perhaps the passenger wouldn’t notice that straight away, but certainly the benefits are starting to feed in now.”

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