Whoever said the railways are slow to innovate - they were wrong

David Waboso
28 July 2015

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Innovation

London Underground is rethinking its strategies for old and new infrastructure and breaking the mould in the process, reports David Waboso.

Railways are complex systems and use a wide range of technologies to deliver highly reliable service to, in London Underground’s case, over four million passengers a day.

The Tube’s capital portfolio covers everything from track, cast iron tunnels and old signal cabins whose basic properties haven’t changed much over the last century, to computer-controlled trains which are more akin to modern fly-by-wire aircraft and eons away from the early steam and electric trains LU started with.

"I’d love to reach 40 trains per hour but that requires even more innovation – but it’s what London needs!"

However innovation is something we apply across all the system as we demand ever more efficiency and capacity out of our network, regardless of the underlying technology. So yes, the modern wiz-bang stuff is hugely innovative and as we know, easy to constantly improve as all it takes is a new software drop to provide additional functionality. But the older stuff also needs and benefits from innovation and we’ve demonstrated on all our infrastructure and station programmes that innovation in the  traditional construction world is just as important and has many different challenges.

For example we’ve recently had to replace 359 tunnel rings on the Jubilee line which were corroding due to water ingress and as usual, we had to do this without affecting the railway’s daily operations. When we first looked at the problem it seemed impossible to do this without very long blockades but we set the team (including a specialist mining supply chain) the challenge of doing this in the few hours we have overnight, and a handful of weekend shutdown.

And they innovated through thinking outside the box, finding totally new ways of removing and replacing tunnel segments in very short periods, setting up prototype trial sites and equipment, then trying it and improving.

It became a very predictable production process which allowed us to beat our nightly production targets early. Mission impossible was achieved in May when they completed the last tunnel ring overnight and no one was prouder of that team than me as we finished on schedule, within budget, with zero impact on reliability, a remarkable safety record, and well within the original closures estimate.

I met some of the miners in our team recently and we discussed a real challenge facing the industry as our domestic mining industry declines and the expertise, often family and regionally-based, is lost. In our tightly constrained sites such as Victoria, Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street stations, we rely on hand-mining in certain areas and we will have to think how we grow the expertise ourselves and this will feature in our plans for the tunnelling academy at Ilford, where Crossrail has invested brilliantly in the future and TfL will carry on the mantle as Crossrail completes.

Track is another great example of innovation where we face similar challenges of doing huge amounts of work with zero impact on the reliability of the railway and in ever-reducing closures. The team researched and visited other railways to see how they faced this challenge. But whilst they gained valuable insight into methods and engineering standards, they found no one was doing heavy renewals overnight, which was now a requirement for us.

The modern wiz-bang stuff is hugely innovative and as we know, easy to constantly improve as all it takes is a new software drop to provide additional functionality. But the older stuff also needs and benefits from innovation"

So they did a similar thing to the tunnel lining challenge – took the problem apart, challenged conventional thinking, invested in trial sites and new kit. And then they slowly started doing five metres a night then 10 then 15 then multiple sites until now, when we are demonstrating that it is possible to do nearly as much in weeknights as we do in a weekend shutdown.

This is transforming the way we reduce closures and hence improve the impact they have on our customers. Now railways from around the world are visiting us to see how it’s done.

In our stations programmes we’ve innovated with engineering, for example at Victoria Station where we’ve broken the record of how many grout injection columns we’ve installed (over 2,000) as we literally construct the new enlarged station around the existing station and its 80M passengers a year, with close to zero disruption.

And we’ve also innovated on procurement through the Innovative Contractor Engagement (ICE) model, as well as the Stake model on the Integrated Station Programme where we take on the long-term relationships with the Tier 2 and 3 contractors.

Coming back to the software and “app”-based world, it’s the pace of change that’s so exciting.

I often say the issue is we cannot now predict new technologies and their impact on us except to say it will increasingly shape our productivity and performance dramatically. On software, our computerised train control systems now fire trains through at 90 second intervals and we soon plan to increase our service to 36 trains per hour on some of our lines.

I’d love to reach 40tph but that requires even more innovation – but it’s what London needs!

Putting all the signalling on the trains also means we’re removing all our trackside equipment, which radically improves our maintenance efficiency and performance. On the “app” front, we developed in –house a tablet-based application that allows technical officers to monitor track circuit performance (track circuit failures have an awful impact on the railway, shutting it down till they’re fixed) and if they see the early voltage changes they can get to the specific equipment room and fix things before they fail.

As well as the software coding and network architecture development, the system ensures a high-quality interface – suitable to meet the demands of our staff who are used to seeing the latest gadgets and technologies on the high-street. We’ve got similar monitoring on our points machines and if we start to see resistance to movement increasing it’s often a precursor to points failing altogether and again, we then get someone to site pre-emptively.

"I met some of the miners in our team recently and we discussed a real challenge facing the industry as our domestic mining industry declines and the expertise, often family and regionally-based, is lost. We rely on hand-mining in certain areas and we will have to think how we grow the expertise ourselves" 

Trains also monitor their on-board systems and remotely send data back to base (just like aircraft) so if necessary they can be taken out of service and fixed before they fail.

We’ve now also mounted track monitoring equipment on our passenger trains so they can provide real-time data back to the centre on track condition.

A huge innovation was TfL making its service data openly available to app developers, in effect allowing others to develop and market transport information products to customers.

This bold strategy has really paid dividends in that there are now multiple apps available for tube, rail and bus services that are really useful and helpful to our customers. We also recently worked with an app developer and the RLSB to produce a smartphone-based station navigation aid for the visually impaired. This has been successful and was featured on national media.

Incredibly, these types of apps are developed in a matter of weeks by small teams, illustrating the power and efficiency of this technology. Many of these are focused on open standards and open platforms, illustrating our power to enable and drive a growing UK SME industry.

So, innovation is rightly at the forefront of all our thinking – whether it’s applied to old technology, software or “apps”, or to procurement. It’s needed everywhere as have to deliver ever more performance, efficiently!

David Waboso is London Underground’s capital programmes director