Britain’s railways are steadily improving. Day by day, bit by bit, the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle for improved performance are falling into place – and a jigsaw puzzle is exactly what it is. And this jigsaw puzzle will not solve itself simply by wishing it. It requires continuous effort by everyone involved, supported by meaningful decision support tools.
“Look at yesterday,” says Brian Halliday, Systems Engineering Manager of Network Rail, the non-profit organisation that owns and operates the British railway network and major stations. On one single web page, updated daily, he shows the key performance statistics of yesterday’s railway operations in figures, colours and columns. These statistics include: the percentage of trains that were on time, the major delay incidents and the overall train delay in minutes by geographic area.
“Our painstaking work is based on a few large and many small improvements influencing all aspects of the railway network.” British train passengers want more than anything trains that run on time. The train operators and passengers also want shorter and shorter travelling times.
Largest railway project in Europe.
Brian Halliday is responsible for driving performance improvements as part of the upgrading of the West Coast Mainline – UK’s busiest mixed traffic railway, with 2,500 trains per day, 11 passenger operators and both national and international freight.
The West Coast Mainline upgrade is the largest current railway project in Europe, with an investment framework of in excess of GBP 7.2 billion. This key route links London to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. This major project involves substantial renewal of track, signalling systems and power supplies together with major track layout schemes increasing train capacity.
Virgin’s new tilting trains now in service travel at 200 km per hour and will take less than 4 hours 30 minutes to travel from London to Glasgow on project completion. The journey from London to Manchester already takes only approximately two hours. On both these stretches, airlines have to be very good to compete with trains with regards to door to door time,” concludes Brian Halliday.
Dynamic simulation model.
DNV Consulting is helping Network Rail in its forecast work and is conducting performance forecasting analyses. Central to this drive for improved performance is the use of a dynamic simulation model to project railway system level reliability.
DNV Consulting has utilised its TRAIL software for this work. This system level railway reliability platform has been developed over seven years and is utilised as part of the West Coast Route Modernisation programme as well as other major UK projects. It provides a simulation model of a large geographic area of the railway.
The forecasts are Correct.
To date, this model has been used for overall system capability, setting and evaluation, and for asset reliability target setting and evaluation. The strengths of this modelling approach have been proven among other things in its ability to inform the projection of overall train punctuality.
“The forecasts have proved to be reasonably accurate when compared to observed performance, and we envisage that we can use the same simulation methodology when developing other national enhancement projects across
the railway network,” says Brian Halliday.