25.09.14
Nine winners to share £3m for electrification innovation
Nine organisations are to receive a share of research funding worth £3m for proposals to reduce the cost of electrification schemes by avoiding the need to reconstruct bridges and tunnels.
The FutureRailway electrification competition winners are: Balfour Beatty, DGauge, Electren, Freyssinet, IDOM, PCAT Consortium, Tata Steel, TRL and URS.
Funded as part of a FutureRailway competition managed by RSSB, and in partnership with Network Rail and the Department for Transport, the proposed solutions to avoid reconstruction include: new design tools, innovative ways to reduce the construction depth of overhead line electrification equipment (OLE), and new track lowering and bridge jacking techniques.
Feasibility studies will run until January 2015 after which finalists will be chosen to proceed to the demonstrator phase.
David Clarke, director of FutureRailway, and a judge at RTM’s UK Rail Industry Awards, said: “Altering and reconstructing bridges and tunnels is roughly 25% of the cost of electrification and therefore we saw this as an area worth exploring for new cost reduction opportunities.
“The conventional wisdom was that everything worth trying had already been tried. It is really pleasing that we are announcing the start of the feasibility studies on nine very credible but novel ideas from innovative suppliers. We hope this will in time lead to the railway being able to deliver more electrification with the funding available.”
The electrification programme is one of a series of competitions to promote innovation within the rail industry and enable the delivery of the Rail Technical Strategy (RTS), aiming to reduce the cost and carbon, but increase the capacity and customer satisfaction in the future railway in Britain.
Other FutureRailway projects have included competitions to improve ticket detection at busy gatelines, to redesign rolling stock for the future and next-generation train interiors, to exploit remote condition monitoring, to improve the customer experience, to improve the design of and aesthetics of overhead line gantries, the ‘Radical Train’ project, a pantograph measurement device competition, and the battery-powered train (IPEMU) project with Network Rail.
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