Researchers attend the RRUKA Annual Conference and Blue Sky Village

King’s Place, London, hosted this year’s RRUKA Annual Conference and Blue Sky Village, where our researchers held demonstrations of current rail related projects. These included the joint ISVR/nCATS project tackling the ‘adhesion riddle’, GeoData research with RSSB developing an online geospatial safety risk model (GeoSRM) and automotous rail model.

The ‘adhesion riddle’ created by ‘leaves on the line’ was being tackled using StarStream®. The technology was demonstrated on the day by cleaning a range of contamination including real rail components. StarStream® uses a slow trickle of water with bubbles generated ultrasonically to scrub surfaces. Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Liam Goodes said “This event was great fun to be able to demonstrate the cleaning power of StarStream® to interested members of the rail community”.

GeoData’s Dr Jason Sadler demonstrated the GeoSRM prototype, an online tool which could improve future rail safety in Great Britain. The web mapping tool can be used by RSSB to assess where the areas of risk are along Britain’s extensive railway networks. The demonstration showed how you can visualise and analyse the rail network and train journeys in Great Britain to detect where the hazards are and the severity of those risks. The research prototype initially targets the Wessex region, looking at risks including suicides; derailments; and slips, trips and falls; and the allows analysis to focus down to as small as 10 metre stretches of track. Demonstrations also included results of the recent NERC-funded environmental risk extension, extending the prototype to incorporate live and historic environmental and related rail incident data to further augment and improve the risk model

The research was funded by the Rail Safety and Standard Board (RSSB).

For more information see Adhesion Rail Riddle and GeoData.