Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Railway research in a changing world
'Spring is a season of hope', began South Korea's transport minister Chong Jong-Hwan, inaugurating the 8th World Congress on Railway Research in Seoul on May 19. Welcoming delegates from more than 40 countries, Chong commented that the rail mode 'embraces great meaning for civilisation'. More prosaically, Korail's Acting President Park Kwang-Suk suggested that 'we are witnesses to a global change in the perception of railways - and I believe that it is research that has helped this to happen.'
With almost 300 presentations, WCRR explored a wide range of topics. Separate streams addressed infrastructure, rolling stock, system interaction, operations, and human factors, as well as 'global railway issues'.
As SNCF's Director of Research Alain Le Guellec pointed out, 'innovation is not just about designing new train concepts'. Focusing on customer service, he ran through areas such as touch-and-travel barcode ticketing, internet sales and distribution, freight telematics, scheduling, and management tools as just a few examples. But whilst innovation is all very well, 'it is up to the operators to implement the results'.
There was a strong focus on international projects bringing together infrastructure managers, operators, suppliers and academics, and evidence of more commercial developments with a clearly-targeted application. The reason was simple, suggested Joachim Meyer of Deutsche Bahn. 'Traffic is growing faster than we can build infrastructure to accommodate it, so we have to use technology to make the best use of what we have got'.
This point was picked up by Semih Kalay of TTCI, reviewing the 'huge drive' in North America on wayside monitoring and inspection to support the operation of longer, heavier and faster trains. Bringing together axlebox, bogie ride, wheel profile and a host of other detectors allows railways to track individual vehicle performance in near real time, but this poses a huge challenge in terms of 'changing data into actionable information'.
We have commented before about the challenges of climate change and energy consumption, and more than one speaker at WCRR suggested that sustainability - in its broadest sense - would be a major driver of railway research over the coming years. UIC Chief Executive Luc Aliadière looked at current demographic trends and pointed out 'a clear contradiction between globalisation ?and sustainability' - although he added that 'human philosophy is all about managing our contradictions.'
The UK's Rail Safety & Standards Board is working on some innovative 'Foresight Studies' to try and understand the implications of the changing shape of the global economy. Joanna Gilligan's prize-winning paper in the 'global rail' stream pictured four radically different scenarios based around energy resources, personal mobility and political direction, which she hopes will trigger a strategic debate about what they might mean for the rail sector over the next 50 to 100 years.
Summing up at the end of the congress, Aliadière said it was clear that rail 'has an important role to play in the future transport mix'. But he emphasised that 'continuous improvement is vital', adding that 'research and development are key to keeping the railway improving'. Sustainability 'should be a guideline for everything you do', he suggested, identifying three areas for future research:
- sustain rail's environmental advantage, as its competitors are improving all the time;
- face up to the increasing cost of energy, and all of the related implications;
- attract investment to develop the capacity and technology to handle growing demand.
However, we feel that it is important to highlight Aliadière's warning that 'people are not choosing rail because of its environmental advantages, but because the service quality is better.' With the emerging risk of a global economic slowdown driven by soaring oil prices and turbulence in the financial markets, railways must face up to the fact that potential customers are more likely to make their transport and logistics decisions on the basis of cost and quality than on global sustainability. And here there is still much for the researchers to do.
