“The second part of the digital railway is the smart infrastructure - smart trains, remote condition monitoring, predict-and-prevent railway that leads you to a much more efficient and reliable asset, because you then move into the sphere of more fully understanding your asset. If you understand your asset’s performance, you’re able to maintain it in a totally different way.
“That’s the second part of it, and a lot of it’s in the Group Digital Railway. People often ask the difference between DR and Group Digital Railway. DR is the first and Group Digital Railway leads you to the second because it has not just telecoms but also asset inspection trains. It has ORBIS , which is leading us into the future of the asset management world, and we’re still innovating on some more stuff around that.
“In the third bucket, if you like, is passenger information and ticketing and all that stuff. And again, because of telecoms, we have a strong link to that. But we don’t do that because that’s much more in the TOC/RDG world. But we support that, because once you have intelligence on trains and intelligence trackside and a very good comms system, you’re able to do a lot with all that as an enabler.”
Looking in more detail at all that more forensically reveals a further change to what’s gone before, which comes as a result of Waboso’s insight and experience. Evolution, in other words. The current ‘framework outline business case’ from November 2015, that sits on NR’s Digital Railway website lists Phase 1 projects as being Romford traffic management, Level 2 deployment on the Paddington approach to Heathrow Airport, and Level 2 deployment to the East Coast Main Line.
Waboso explains: “My experience of doing this stuff, which I’ve done for longer than I care to remember, is that you need to build up from the bottom as opposed to taking it down from the top.”
“And so if I build from the bottom, I’ve got some schemes that are going on. Those are the Phase 1 schemes, which are Thameslink, Crossrail and Romford. Those are the big three current digital schemes and we’re working very hard to support those schemes.
“Crossrail and Thameslink are their own programmes with their own governance, so we don’t get in the way of that - it’s very important not to confuse accountabilities. We are supporting in any way we can and supporting to ensure they are successful. It’s very important that they’re successful because they provide the confidence that digital railway technology can deliver.”
That last point is vital. Digital Railway’s detractors could portray the programme as ‘order, counter-order, disorder’. The changes over the past few years could be seen to validate this view. Since he arrived last summer, Waboso has clearly seen, however, that the programme needs to associate itself with some successes, even if (like Thameslink) they are at arms-length. Entirely understandable.
Thameslink does many of the things associated with a digital railway. It includes Automatic Train Operation, high capacity from short block sections, and a traffic management system that works with ATO to feed trains efficiently through the incredibly congested central core through London, from King’s Cross to Blackfriars. This core is based on ERTMS, but the lines feeding it from north and south, are not.
There’s another dose of nuance needed here. European rules mandate ERTMS for lines that form part of its trans-European network (TENs lines). This means Britain must install it on the country’s TENs lines, rather than any proprietary system a manufacturer might otherwise offer. It could install proprietary kit on other lines, but that would open all sorts of problems with compatibility and would be more trouble than any financial savings might represent. It also assumes, by the way, that manufacturers would offer anything other than ERTMS – and this is probably unlikely, given that it’s being used all round the world and is increasingly the only form of modern signalling, command and control technology you can buy.
There’s a parallel with personal computers. A few years ago you could buy an external hard drive with either a USB connector or a Firewire connector. Both hard drives would do the same job in the same way. But you couldn’t use a Firewire version if your computer only had only USB ports. Today you won’t find Firewire versions on sale - the standard is USB, so that’s what you buy and use.
In the same way, ERTMS is without question the way forward, and Thameslink can today show the benefits of digital railway principles (although passengers will have to wait a little longer as the new kit and new trains are tested and commissioned).
The experience that Waboso brings from London Underground is based on these principles. It’s valuable, as he relates: “First, you bring credibility and confidence that it can be done. That’s the first thing you bring. It’s not vapour-ware. It’s not people promising. It’s experience of what can be done, and the scars because the experience that matters is ‘where are the pitfalls, where are the mistakes, where are the risks’.
“That’s what you pay people for in this business. So you bring the credibility of doing it, and you bring the capability. You attract the people who follow you around and want to play in this space. You bring people who have done it. I tend to move around and bring the same people because I gather people around who’ve done it before. I’ve got people here who’ve delivered DLR, who’ve delivered the six lines I’ve talked about on the Underground. I’ve got people who have done this in Singapore, in Hong Kong - they’ve all joined. I’ve got people from Thameslink, not from Crossrail yet because they need every person they can get.”
