Short-term solutions for saving costs

Finding ways to reduce costs while delivering train services for passengers or freight requires a sophisticated understanding of rail. Working with industry, using our expertise, and based on the insights revealed by data, we’re continually finding ways that can help rail reduce short term costs. Here’s some recent highlights.

Turn off your engine

Engine idling in stations might look like an obvious area to address, but the issue isn’t as straightforward as it might look. Sometimes turning an engine off when waiting inside a station can make it difficult to restart, cause pressure problems in train braking systems, or other problems. Idling duration varies with train types and train operators too.

We recently completed a project looking at ways to reduce idling for the GB rail industry. We’ve found that some engine idling is ‘avoidable’. In collaboration with industry, we’ve developed a new Good Practice Guide that helps you reduce avoidable train idling. There isn’t a one-size fits all answer. Instead, our guide explains the issues involved with idling in general and avoidable idling and how to define them. It emphasises the value of collecting data about idling. And it shows how to develop realistic, workable strategies to reduce idling that are specific to individual train operating companies.

Across the whole network we estimate that, annually, up to £20m can be saved in fuel costs alone if avoidable idling was reduced. This is around 8.5% of total diesel usage across the entire GB rail network. There are also benefits for noise and air quality. So download our Good Practice Guide and start saving fuel costs.

Medical fitness

Getting the medical fitness of staff right is an essential element of safety management. Fail to assess or detect a fitness issue in safety-critical staff raises safety risks, and this may lead to incidents or accidents. But apply a higher standard than is necessary and you will be restricting workers from jobs they are able to do. This is not good for the individual or the company losing skilled workers. It could also be breaking the Equality Act 2010, which can have unlimited financial penalties. You could also harm the industry’s reputation adding to recruitment challenges.

In response to industry feedback, we’ve overhauled our standards and guidance about the medical fitness of safety-critical staff. We’ve been guided by the latest best practice, advances in medical knowledge and examination methods, and legal updates throughout. We’ve reduced two standards into one and issued new guidance. Together, these give a clearer, more consistent way to assess and manage medical fitness. They have best practices that can reduce delays caused by medical issues, and help you prevent impairment at work and ensure the fitness of safety-critical staff. The estimated benefits are £17.8 million over five years.

Predicting wheelset problems

Wheelset condition monitoring for freight wagons is another area where efficiency can lead to cost reductions, especially if we use a more proactive and predictive knowledge approach. The sector uses data from the Wheel Impact Load Detector (WILD) system to help identify faulty or damaged wheelsets. These could create derailment risk or damage to the track. The WILD system is installed on Network Rail infrastructure to measure wheelset loads from passing traffic to detect wheelset defects. So it’s already collecting very useful data.

With our partner, the University of Huddersfield, we’ve been working on new ways to analyse this data so we make better use of it. Optimising the use of the data will improve asset availability and reliability. These improvements will enable better monitoring. In turn, this will improve efficiency and costs by identifying potential safety issues. The freight sector will also be able to optimise maintenance schedules proactively. All this assists the freight sector in service reliability, reputation for new and existing customers, and growing freight safely.

Savings from recent work

We estimate important cost savings as a result of our work with industry in other areas too. New signs for temporary and permissible speed restrictions will improve performance, reduce delays, and save money. The cost reductions could be as much as £41m over five years. And our publication of a new standard for route- and line-proving trains, with accompanying Rule Book updates, introduces a consistent way for these vital tasks to be done across the whole industry. Expected benefit over five years from these improvements is smaller, at £6.3m, but still substantial.

Running the railway isn’t easy, and today’s cost pressures add to the challenge. But we are already helping you save significant amounts of money in these projects alone. We look forward to the whole industry making use of them.