A £5 million rail innovation fund has given 26 projects permission to approach Britain’s railway with ideas for making journeys safer, clearer and less likely to involve a mysterious announcement from the far end of platform nine.
The Department for Transport and Innovate UK announced the winners on 2 September. The projects will be tested in real railway conditions, where promising technology must first negotiate rain, signal faults and a passenger holding the emergency intercom to ask whether Crewe comes before Stafford.
The FOAK competition includes work on platform safety, passenger safety and bridge strike prevention. One project, IntelliPan Network, will use artificial intelligence to detect faults on overhead lines. Another, SafeRide 5G, will let passengers report incidents through their own devices using onboard Wi Fi.
This is precisely the sort of work that sounds futuristic until it is placed beside a departure board, where the technological challenge remains persuading the word “shortly” to refer to a period shorter than a geological era.
“The railway is ready to embrace bold new thinking,” said Pandora, Director of Tomorrow’s Replacement Bus, whose department has already taught a spreadsheet to look concerned. “Our systems will identify hazards, improve passenger information and eventually establish which platform the train is using.”
The projects are demonstrations, not miracles. They will spend the coming months trying to prove that their inventions can survive contact with the network. This is the most demanding stage of any British transport programme, because the prototype must work while being discussed by three bodies, reviewed by two consultants and connected to infrastructure installed when everyone travelled with one leg and no suitcase.
Previous winners are already being used across the railway, according to the announcement. A track measuring system has helped engineers obtain information quickly enough to lift speed restrictions or line closures sooner. Somewhere, a passenger has therefore reached a destination only slightly later than the revised estimate.
The fund’s stated aim is to improve safety, reliability and passenger experience. It may even encourage more people to choose rail, provided the new technology can explain why a service displayed as “on time” has been standing in a siding since breakfast.
For now, the 26 projects have a platform, a grant and several months in which to demonstrate the future. The future will then be assessed, integrated and passed to a committee, where it will be informed that the line is closed because an earlier version of itself has failed to arrive.
Real story: Department for Transport.
