Network Rail regulation and performance

PCF provides possession visualisation for Network Rail

Possession management is a major challenge for all railway operators worldwide, due to the long lead times associated with track possessions and the need to coordinate the activities of multiple stakeholder communities. PCF’s planning tool ensures full visibility of all planned work at an early stage in the planning process ensuring greatest efficiency from possessions which can rapidly yield significant cost savings

On linear projects such as those in the rail industry, one standard technique for visualising where work is happening is the use of time chainage diagrams. These are very similar to a Gantt chart but use the vertical axis to display location, defined as a distance from a datum point. In this way work at a fixed point on the line appears as a horizontal bar, while work along a track section appears as a diagonal line, with the slope indicating the rate of progress. Where two lines cross, work is occurring in the same place at the same time, giving instant identification of possession clashes.

In 2001, PCF was approached by Network Rail-then Railtrack- with a request to develop a standalone proof of concept system to display possessions on the UK rail network using time chainage diagrams. Six years later, the current version is deployed on Network Rail’s corporate network, creating diagrams based on worksite and location data extracted directly from possession and asset management systems. Areas of interest are defined as “journeys” consisting of one or more adjacent track sections, and users can then create chainage diagrams for any journey, for any specified range of dates. A separate component of the system integrates Network Rail’s corporate planning tools to the possession management system, providing extensive validation and automatic transfer of key data from one to the other.

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