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Track renewals handback at 140mph

Bob Clarke In 1985, British Rail was moving to a market/business led structure in which sector managers had a budgetary control and were required to grow their business. For the Inter-City sector, journey time improvements were high on the agenda. Electrification of the East Coast Main Line (ECML) was underway...

Full steam ahead for Siemens Goole Rail Village

Rail Engineer has reported widely on Siemens Mobility’s Rail Village in Goole, East Yorkshire, home to its Train Manufacturing Factory, Component Facility, Logistics Centre warehousing facility, and RaisE business centre. The state-of-the-art facility is playing a key role in producing the next generation of UK trains, building the highly anticipated...

Very Light Rail: an update

Back in September 2012 (Issue 95), Rail Engineer carried a feature on cross-industry innovation which considered the potential for the rail industry to adopt technologies developed for the automotive industry, such as lightweighting. This was a recurring theme at various events such as the 2017 Institution of Mechanical Engineers’...

Standardisation of embedded rail for light-rail systems

Embedded rail is used on street-running tramways. The rail section used generally includes effectively a continuous checkrail (known as the keeper) and enables a clear boundary between the paved road surface and the tram running rail. Grooved rail is far from standardised. Twenty-six rail sections are defined in EuroNorms and...

Injury prevention requires investment in technology

The number of UK rail workers suffering serious injuries is increasing. Yes, the railways are inherently dangerous, but health and safety has never been higher on the agenda, so why are the figures not falling? In September, the Office of Road and Rail (ORR) released its 2024 Rail Safety Report....

Sydney Metro: transforming the city for generations to come

One of the focus themes of this issue is metro railway systems, and in this article we look at Sydney Metro – the first driverless metro railway in Australia. But to begin, what exactly is a metro railway? Unlike other railways, metros only carry passengers and provide a more intense...

Carlisle crash of 1984 – what can we learn?

Forty years ago, on Tuesday 1 May 1984 at 5.30 in the morning, Bill (Willie) Taylor, a signaller at Carlisle Power Signal Box (PSB) realised that 4S55, a Liverpool (Garston) to Glasgow (Gushetfaulds) freightliner train had become divided south of Carlisle and both portions of the train were rolling...

InnoTrans 2024

Over 2,900 exhibitors from 59 nations. Forty-two halls with a total floor area of 120,000 square metres and a kilometre long site that has three-and-a-half kilometres of track displaying over a hundred rail vehicles. That’s InnoTrans 2024. Over three days, your writer walked 24,000 steps per day and probably only...

Innovation in London and the South

The Railway Industry Association (RIA) is continuing its regional seminars to encourage innovation around the UK, holding its latest event in September covering the South of England and asking whether improved services might result from the introduction of new and imaginative thinking. The venue for this event was the Ricardo...

IMechE Railway Division Chair’s address 2024

Iain Rae is the Railway Division (RD) chair for 2024/25. He started his traditional tour of RD Centres in Swindon in early September, a long way from his home in Scotland. He is the fifty-sixth chair and his theme is about diversity, inclusion and the skills gap in the...

RIA Conference – Supplying the railway with projects, equipment and services

The Railway Industry Association (RIA) annual conference is a big event at which the supply chain can hear from government, regulators, Network Rail, and train companies. Over 300 people were in attendance representing suppliers, from the big Tier 1 companies to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), to hear what’s...