Shaping Future Transport Systems: Rail Industry Challenges and Solutions

SHAPING FUTURE TRANSPORT SYSTEMS: RAIL INDUSTRY CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
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Shaping Future Transport Systems: Rail Industry Challenges and Solutions
Introduction
The rail industry plays an important role in the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) transport system. It provides a safe, reliable as well as fast means of transporting individuals and merchandise to different areas, around and within the cities and internationally. The rail network facilitates the movement of people to their workplaces or to visit their colleagues and families. It also facilitates the ability to engage in commercial activities. It stimulates the effective mobility of merchandise from quarries, ports as well as distribution facilities to cities and other urban centres, as well as reduce traffic jams on the roads by eliminating the need for long-distance trailers or lorries. Despite the value of the British rail industry in the country, the region, and across the globe, it faces significant challenges that threaten to undermine the industry’s push toward sustainable improvements and prospects. British rail network faces a decade of technological advancement, environmental issues, economic turmoil and personnel management challenges. Although the problems mentioned above are not new, they prove increasingly challenging, especially amid the global Covid-19 pandemic, thus prompting the need for urgent and effective countermeasures.
Environmental Issues and Solutions
Air Pollution
Rail transportation means constitutes a relatively low-carbon approach to moving and travelling merchandise from one place to another. Irrespective of the disastrous impacts of the Covid-19 crisis, the rail industry recorded 703 million trips in 2020. A great deal of these trips potentially represented greener choices rather than carbon-intensive transport modes. Nevertheless, the British government’s commitment scale implies that relatively insignificant carbon proves inadequate to address environmental pollution issues. The industry is committed to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The goal of realising net zero emissions within the rail transport framework remains incongruent with the industry’s actions that continue to generate approximately three megatons of CO2e, as recorded in fiscal 2019-20.
Air pollution emanates from diesel train emissions that comprise a plethora of dangerous pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) as well as particulate matter (PM). Nationally, the rail industry contributes approximately 2 per cent of the total NOx and below 1 per cent of the aggregate PM. In certain instances, diesel vessels might contribute substantially to deteriorated air quality in specific areas for different reasons. For instance, within the walled rail stations, the idling diesel trains and the enclosed environment contribute to the pollutants’ build-up (Department of Transport, 2021, p.14).
Research, innovation, and development are essential in establishing the most practical approaches to enhance air quality within the short-medium term in the quest to deliver a net zero-emission railway by 2050. In this way, the industry invested £2.5 million in 2019 via the FoaK competitions to finance new technologies’ development and ensure they can be overhauled to the current diesel vessels to lower the magnitudes of the detrimental pollutant emitted substantially. This effort incorporates hybridisation with fuel-saving capabilities and tools, including batteries as well as exhaust gases after treatment, leveraging a catalytic converter technology approach. In addition, idle diesel trains constitute a significant emissions source in contexts of high possible human exposure, for example, within stations (Department of Transport, 2021, p.14). Therefore, the industry is committed to reducing the number of idling trains as a practical approach to reduce air pollution without necessitating additional technical innovations within the current diesel trains.
Government policy can also help address environmental pollution emanating from the rail industry. For example, the government launched the Clean Air Strategy (CAS) in 2019, which delineated the specific actions central to enhancing the quality of the air and lowering the prevalence of severe chronic diseases, augmenting the life quality of many citizens. The CAS committed to halving the detrimental impacts on human well-being due to deteriorated air quality by 2030. The program also pledged to mitigate the rail industry’s greenhouse gas emissions (Department of Transport, 2021, p.14). Therefore, the industry needs to create regulations that coincide with government policies on environmental sustainability and pollution reduction mandates.
Noise Pollution
Railway services provision causes noises that could be a nuisance to the nearby stakeholders, including lineside neighbours, staff and passengers. It could also negatively affect the individual’s well-being and health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), environmental noise constitutes one of Europe’s leading ecological well-being risks. Environmental noise also causes annoyance and sleep disturbances. There is burgeoning evidence demonstrating that noise increases an individual’s vulnerability to developing diseases such as stroke and heart attack. The Network Rail, in collaboration with the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) and the government, should constantly be investigating the respective noise Important Areas (IAs) and report their proximity to the applicable local authorities (Department of Transport, 2021, p.33). This report should incorporate a delineation of the recently undertaken or anticipated interventions that would be increasingly advantageous to the impacted populations, supporting the implementation of government programs and rules on noise.
Technological Issues and Solutions
The UK rail industry constantly struggles to attain genuine innovation, with negligible meaningful shifts in infrastructure or services over the recent decades. The lack of speed in operations, coupled with backward infrastructure, undermines the ability of the industry to achieve innovation and attain competitiveness in the regional and global arena. This has culminated in public perspectives of an inefficient and obsolete railway system which is unable to keep up-to-date with the dynamic pace of the new technological capabilities as well as augment customer expectations. Even before the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, rail operators were emphasising innovation to optimise costs, reliability and performance, foster customer experience and engagement, and cultivate “digital fitness” to future-proof their activities. Nevertheless, these efforts are constantly compromised by the sheer fragmentation and complexity of the rail industry, where novel technologies are required to integrate with diverse legacy systems, both in train operating firms and within infrastructure systems from Rail Delivery Group or Network Rail. With respect to this ecosystem, Information Technology (IT) projects might rapidly grow in scalability, cost, and complexity (Blue Prism Limited, 2020, slide 5). Even in contexts where new technological capabilities are implemented, rail operators constantly struggle to optimally leverage the benefits, particularly regarding data access, to generate insights into operational productivity and performance.
To overcome the innovation challenges, train operators can implement intelligent automation to solve challenges related to (a) optimising costs, reliability and performance, (b) improving quality, speed and services and (c) achieving “digital fitness” as a precondition to success. Government regulators are piling pressure on the train industry operators to invest in novel technology and systems that would deliver long-term operational and financial benefits as well as mitigate costs, downtime and penalties by developing all systems and operations at optimal performance. In this context, the industry players need to demonstrate the ability to keep their trains running for extended timescales without disruptions by mitigating unscheduled or planned maintenance measures as well as revolutionising maintenance processes to guarantee that assets remain in service for longer. By levering intelligent automation, the industry players would fully automate huge and complex procedures to generate significant value. This would enable the operators to optimise their operational productivity and plan, comprehend and draw critical insights into new industry patterns to remain abreast with the rising market competition (Blue Prism Limited, 2020, slide 7). Concerning the challenge of augmenting quality, speed and services, the rail industry should recognise that customer expectations are constantly evolving and rising within the contemporary on-demand society. Speed and quality have become of great significance to individuals as price. With intelligence automation, the industry would liberate human work from rules-based, repetitive work by ensuring they collaborate with intelligent virtual staff in real-time to address expectations to create rules, mistake reduction and speed up operations. Rail industry operators can achieve significant customer experience improvements at every touchpoint by computerising repetitive, rule-based, and time-consuming tasks (Blue Prism Limited, 2020, slide 7). Lastly, the industry players should leverage best-in-class intelligence systems to combine conventional robotic automation with artificial intelligence (AI) functionality, as well as additional capabilities, including natural language processing, to computerise a far extensive range of workplace procedures (Blue Prism Limited, 2020, slide 7). The digital workforce is an integration model between the current legacy systems tailored to guarantee information and data flow accurately and quickly across the organisation, allowing operators to design and launch innovative applications and services, both external and internal, without long-winded communications technology infrastructure programs.
Economic Challenges and Solutions
In the year culminating on 31 March 2021, the rail industry recorded a grant income of £0.2bn higher compared to what the regulator has assumed for the current year. This was mainly due to other expenditure discrepancies or rather variances. Other expenditure variances, such as additional renewals delivered in 2021, accounted for the amounts received from the government. However, train operators’ incomes were lower compared to what the operator had anticipated, mainly due to reduced electricity traction revenue offset by reduced prices footed by Network Rail to obtain electricity to run its trains. Although Network R...