7.2.1 UK Railway System Reliability ‐ Modelling the Future – a Case Study

Abstract

AbstractIn the 15 years since privatisation, the British railway has undergone a major transformation: investment has increased 60% since 1996/97; ridership has increased by 60%; and reliability has grown to over 90% ‐ all this on one of the most complex and congested mixed traffic railways in the world.Building on this success, the railway is now being challenged further to become even more reliable and to provide better value for money for both taxpayers and passengers. In response to this challenge, the national cross industry Technical Strategy Leadership Group has set strategic targets for doubling capacity, halving costs and carbon emissions and significantly improving the passenger experience over the next thirty years.Capacity, Reliability and Cost in the railway are interrelated and represent the principal pressure factors in the UK Railways. It may be relatively easy to improve two, at the expense of the third, however improving all three factors at the same time is a major challenge.This paper presents the results of a study whose main objective was to understand the implications of doubling capacity on the existing infrastructure. Whole system level modelling has been applied in order to study the relationship between capacity and reliability and thus further assist the research into practical solutions for the future railway development.TRAIL, a system level modelling tool, has been used to simulate the southern end of the West Coast Main Line (WCML), one of the most congested parts of the GB rail network. The study comprises two phases: Building the base case for the future railway – a double capacity railway with current operating approaches and asset reliabilities. This is a full network model that replicates the actual railway operation, including the signalling control logic. Simulating a range of different incident prevention, control and mitigation measures to enable identification of ‘optimum’ asset reliability requirements beyond which any further asset reliability improvement ceases to have a significant impact on rail service performance The results show significant deterioration from current performance levels with the implementation of the high capacity future timetable. System performance can be returned to an acceptable level if infrastructure and rolling stock reliability improvements, identified in the study were to be realised. The study also identifies several mitigation measures related to the operation of an ‘on‐time’ railway including boundary presentation, sub‐threshold lateness and timetable recovery.A number of overall conclusions are drawn relating to the use of systems models generic to the analysis of performance within any industry characterised by the presence of a large volume of legacy assets and performance monitoring arrangements.