A safer and a better railway

In an extract from his speech at the Rail 100 Breakfast Club in January, Rail Safety and Standards Board Chief Operating Officer Johnny Schute (pictured) outlines the path of standards needed to future-proof our railways

 

The Rail Safety and Standards Board has changed remarkably in the past five years. We’ve improved the ability within the organisation so that we feel confident and comfortable in providing leadership, safety, health, interoperability, technical integration and sustainability.

We bring the industry together, so achieving collaboration. We do it through our traditional routes of groups and committees, but we now generate plans and look for endorsement from those groups and committees - hopefully through consensus, as we know that sticks best, but not at the expense of pace. We must keep moving fast.

We are encouraging innovation through our research and Future Rail programme. This means doing the ‘horizon-scanning’ and ‘thought leadership’ that hard-working rail staff don’t have the time to do.

RSSB plans to go further, to link together our core areas of expertise that sit within strategic business areas, for a safer, healthier, harmonised, sustainable and efficient future railway. We can only do this within six new strategies:

Taking first our aspiration to generate safety and health insights to improve performance. Our vision is to monitor and analyse data better - and we have many terabytes of data in the rail centre.

Transforming our health and wellbeing data insights, so that they’re as good as the ones we have in safety.

Helping develop a strategic workforce plan to reduce industry dependency on specialist skill sets.

Improving safety performance without increasing the regulatory or financial burden, by introducing things such as the Data Reporting, Analysis and Corrective Action System (DRACAS) roadmap. Plus, openly sharing data on defects, faults and failures that lead to safety incidents that are more likely to delay and disrupt travel. This will create a smarter, more cost-effective management of systems safety and health, better able to attract and retain high-calibre and diverse staff in the digital age.

We aim to benefit from artificial intelligence by incorporating learning from the development of train protection and speed supervision into standards - supporting the creation of a new train protection strategy that improves safety and reliability, while using technology to reduce that cost.

Finally, bringing in tools to enable adoption of automation and AI safely, improving predictability of performance, more effective use of capacity, and faster recovery from unexpected changes.

Understanding data

Improving testing capabilities will enable the rail industry to reduce the time and effort for testing new assets. RSSB will do this by issuing guidance on how digital testing can replace physical testing, and help the supply chain assess the high-level impacts and implications of new assets with greater confidence.

We will exploit the value of data, and promote greater data interoperability, through the provision of new guidance and standards, enabling the industry to share, integrate and analyse data quickly and easily, so increasing its value. This should improve rail operations, aiming for an annual industry cost reduction of 1%-2%.

Risk modelling

We want to improve the rail industry’s resilience to extreme weather and climate change through risk modelling and maturity models. These measure our true capability, leading to proportionate, operational responses, and targeted investment in the necessary assets and operations.

We are committed to embedding sustainability, and will implement a sustainable rail blueprint. We aim to grow a sustainable rail culture and include this blueprint in key industry contracts.

Finally, we want to provide the data architecture so there is systematic and efficient monitoring, reporting and analysis of sustainability. This will help rail as the standout sustainable transport mode.

We have designed a tool called PRIMA which looks at operational route sectors. By feeding data such as rainfall, topography or the state of an asset into an algorithm, we can demonstrate an optimum route speed which remains safe given the conditions. It’s mostly about cuttings and embankments, because those are the assets that tend to fail.

PRIMA is a decision support tool. The final decision on route speed remains with the operator. Trials in Cumbria prove it’s viable to raise the speed restriction to 60mph in some cases.

We’re hoping to roll PRIMA out across the UK by the end of 2024, building up our number of assets from tunnels to viaducts and adding different weather conditions.

Leadership

Establishing an optimistic, can-do, confident culture, always striving for the best - accountable, compassionate and relentlessly focused on the mission of providing the best for our customers will restore rail’s fortunes.

People need a purpose and belief in what they’re doing.

We must provide it.

We must give back pride in the sector among both the workforce and the customer. We must innovate because we don’t have the money or resources to do otherwise. We must trust our people and train them properly, look after them, and get them to work together.

We need to stitch together data, to find those insights that will make a difference. We need to use novel technology such as AI and digital testing that will reduce cost and focus on aspects that set us apart from other transport modes, particularly sustainability It underpins our credentials as the greenest mass transit system available.

Collaboration is important, too.

Everyone has a part to play - from rolling stock owners to freight operators, those that work on the infrastructure, and in the supply chain.

I would like to see better collaboration in the digital space, too. RSSB is the data aggregator for the rail industry. But so much of it sits there and isn’t used. We need to see more of it used to solve problems and devise new solutions.

At times, the best can become the enemy of the good.

Getting something ‘out of the door’ that’s 80% complete, but which gets used, is better than something that’s only 100% complete in five years’ time.

We need to know when Great British Railways will be formed, and whether it will give us the direction we so desire. Until it is, I’m unequivocal - in our area of expertise, the leader is RSSB. It’s about safety, reporting, health, interoperability, and standards.

What we can’t have is a void. Unless we start putting industry leaders together to start making constructive headway, we will fall behind.

At RSSB, we’re trying to drive that.