ATOC ‘FUTURE TRAIN’ EVENT
Anyone with an innovation has to be completely confident of its commercial potential, which can be difficult in an industry with so many stakeholders, long timeframes and
miss the chance with to replace it with OLE, we could be waiting another 60 or 70 years”. TSLG,
the Technical Strategy Leadership huge
numbers of procedures. Changing this, he said, is one of the main missions of the EIT. The EIT itself ‘takes orders’ from the TSLG, though its staff are employed and hosted by the RSSB. It has £30m of funding to allocate, Clarke said – £60m once matched by industry.
He noted that there’s a contrast between the perception and the reality as regards the approvals process, saying people often think it is far more arduous than it really is.
“Where is the rail industry’s A380?” he asked. “The automotive and aerospace sectors are more vertically aligned – you can make your own investment decisions. But the A380 was a 20-year development project, and just because a new Ford Focus appears every three years doesn’t mean it only took that long to develop.
“We need more collaboration around the more radical innovations,” he said, again giving the example of the car industry, in which competitors are keen to collaborate when it will benefit all of them. He said they got together to decide on five areas to concentrate on (super- efficient combustion engines, energy storage, lightweighting, intelligent transport systems, improved traction). “Once they have got a working capability, they will be straight back to competitive behaviour,” he said.
He said even once-in-a-lifetime projects like the potential replacement of third rail with overhead line traction is “only being looked at now because the switchgear is worn out… if we
Group, needs to “up its game” to help industry spot these opportunities, he said.
He explained more about the Rail Technical Strategy, and after watching a video demonstrating what it contains, said: “Nothing in there is technologically inconceivable – but it needs the will.”
In a Q&A session after the debate, Francis How,
technical director of the Railway
Industry Association, made the point that with the industry being half rolling stock and half infrastructure, it’s rare to find a project that changes both at once – instead, one is often constrained by the other. He approved of EIT being ‘challenge-led’, but asked: “What about some solutions to questions no-one thought of?”
Clarke said 10% of the EIT budget is allocated to those kinds of blue skies questions, as opposed to practical solutions to existing problems.
There was a discussion about the potential challenge to rail’s current resurgence from ‘automated cars’, and also about Thameslink stopping times over core sections – 45 seconds at King’s Cross was mentioned, which at least one audience member found implausible. Shaw said Berlin Hauptbahnhof was a good model – fast boarding, fast alighting, even with bikes and luggage, thanks to wide platforms, wide doors, and less dogma than the UK about opening doors as trains are slowing down. “Small incremental changes trim the seconds off,” she said.
Below: A graphic from the Rail Technical Strategy.
More on Anthony Smith’s speech on the rolling stock passengers do and don’t like can be found on page 59.
HS2’s head of specification and assurance, Andrew Coombes, spoke next, outlining the history of HS2 and the progress made so far. He described the evidence from European high-speed lines that have caused a big modal shift to rail, such as
Paris-Brussels. When journey times went from 2h25 to 1h25, rail’s modal share jumped from 24% to 50%, car fell from 61% to 43%, and aviation’s share went from 7% to almost nothing.
HS2 itself, he said, is at the moment planned to be “relatively simple in technology terms – we don’t want to base the case on unproven technology”.
But that doesn’t stop it being a complex system when everything is considered: power, communications, noise mitigation, foundations and earthworks, structures, track, control systems and the train itself.
He said there was still “a world of debate” to come on operations, though suggested the trains were likely to have drivers.
He said there is a debate to come on standards, too – European TSI-compliant trains do not have low-noise pantographs or wells designed to minimise aerodynamic noise, he noted, whereas in Japan, with no such standards, the Shinkansen N700 for example does have such mitigation technology.
Coombes discussed the ‘whole journey’ model, with radically different perceived values of each part of the journey – passengers most want to be at their origin and destination, but value time on the train more than time in transit to and from it, and time changing trains or waiting at virtually nil.
Keeping this in mind can help when designing a high speed train system, he noted, rather than focusing just on the train itself. He listed some of the aspects of the ‘passenger experience’ on the 21st-century railway, such as high capacity at 18 trains per hour (up to 1,110 seats per train), intelligent ticketing, comfortable trains and easy access, with good connections and end-to-end journeys.
Shaw concluded the event by discussing the need for collaborative working to turn the Rail Technical Strategy into an active change programme for the industry, not a set of aspirations.
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rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 13 | 57
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