The government’s recent decision to go ahead with the first phase of High-Speed 2, a controversial fast train service between London and Birmingham, has brought a smile to the faces of many in the railway industry. The £32 billion project should bring many opportunities to a sector that was dealt a bitter blow last year when the £1.4 billion Thameslink contract was awarded to German company Siemens, rather than Derby-based Bombardier.
The railway sector is notorious for its ups and downs, but now the outlook seems to be improving. Bombardier, Britain’s last remaining train maker, is planning to refurbish the engineering facilities at its Derby site, and Japanese firm Hitachi is planning to build a factory in the north of England.
Niall Simmons, head of the engineering project management office at Bombardier, sees the prospects for train building as “absolutely fantastic”. He says: “We have got lots of opportunities and it’s not just the UK market.”
Engineers in Derby are working on the car body design for the Swiss SBB double-decker train and the interiors for the São Paulo and Saudi Arabia monorails. Interest is peaking in South Africa, which is an emerging market for the train maker. The company provided trains for the Gautrain railway in Johannesburg in 2010.
Simmons says: “There is an estimate that they will require 8,000 cars over the next 20 years. We are currently looking at what product we would offer as we are expecting a bid to come out in March.”
Closer to home, the company is preparing its bid for the eVoyager contract to upgrade the Bombardier fleet of diesel Cross Country Voyager trains to run on hybrid electric power. If awarded the contract in March, the company plans to add a car fitted with a pantograph that will enable the train to run underneath the 25kV electrification wires and replace the non-Bombardier train control and management system.
In December, Bombardier won a contract worth £189 million to supply Southern with a further 130 Electrostar cars. The project is at the concept design phase with manufacture due to start by the end of the year.
Electrostar is already running on the rails of the Southeastern and Southern networks that cover London, Sussex, Surrey and Kent, as well as on the c2c line that connects London Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street with Shoeburyness in Essex. Similar trains went into service on the National Express East Anglia route to Stansted airport in March 2011.
Looking ahead to the 600-vehicle Crossrail tender, Bombardier hopes to use the experience gained with the Electrostar, and its work on trains for the London Underground Victoria and Metropolitan lines, to inform its designs. Simmons says: “We have so much feedback about how they perform in service and we want to put that into the next new product.”
An area of innovation that Bombardier has been working on is passenger counting systems. “We have a system that counts passengers on and off the train,” explains Simmons. This means operating companies can understand how many people are using the vehicle and change the service accordingly.
Another area of developing technology is condition-based maintenance, which promises to help operators improve efficiency. It uses sensors to identify potential failures before they happen.
One such system monitors the fuel in the diesel tank and communicates with control when levels drop. Currently, trains get sent for refuelling before diesel levels get anywhere near low because operators have to be very careful about running out, explains Simmons. This might not always be sensible if the train is far from fuelling facilities.
Train control and management systems are also evolving. These work across the train to provide realtime information to passengers and feed information from the carriages back to the driver. The latest set-up on the Stansted Express gives passengers information about their journeys in real time, rather than from a timetable. It can notify them of delays, station closures and seat reservations as they happen, and can work automatically, without any input from the driver.
Integrated CCTV enables the driver to see what is happening in the carriages in real time. When in stations, cameras on the train enable the driver to monitor the doors on a display that shows a grid of images from up to 12 carriages.
Tom Williamson, head of systems engineering at Bombardier, says: “Proving these systems on the train is difficult so over the past 10 years there has been a move to test them in a simulator before this.” The systems are then kept running once the train is in service so that the software can be adapted, for quicker door closing, for example, if necessary.
Bombardier plans to convert a portion of its Derby site into a purpose-built facility that will house the bundles of hardware and software needed to run the train control and management system simulators. The go-ahead for this work will depend on the company winning the eVoyager contract, he says.
A further two phases of renovation and development may follow, explains Williamson. Plans include creating a train mock-up area that will enable stakeholders to view and make changes to designs before the final build, a shared work area for Bombardier and customer staff, and the complete renovation of the site’s testing laboratories.
With so many projects on the go, the company is looking for more staff. It has taken on 65 engineers over the past 10 weeks and is still looking for a further 50. Simmons says that the industry has been on a high for quite a while.
Come May, Bombardier may face new competition from within the UK. Japanese train maker Hitachi may be pressing ahead with plans to build a factory at Newton Aycliffe in County Durham. The design has been completed, the land has been allocated, and rail and road connections have been planned. The company will give the go-ahead to the builders once the contract for the Inter-City Express Programme has been finalised.
The factory will begin manufacturing Super Express trains in 2015, to replace the 35-year-old Inter-City 125 fleet that runs on parts of the network. Alistair Dormer, managing director of Hitachi Rail Europe, says: “We are convinced that the UK market and the European wider market is very strong for the railway sector.” The government’s decision to invest in high-speed rail is extremely encouraging, he adds.
The number of passengers using the railways has continued to rise since privatisation, and despite the country’s current economic situation passenger growth is still on the up. “Looking at the future, if the past is telling us anything it is that rail is getting more and more popular,” says Dormer. “Rail has got many environmental benefits and there is a need to add capacity to the network.”
Dormer explains that further afield in Europe, rail travel is continuing to increase and all the major operators have plans for expansion of networks and for high-speed rail. “We are presenting bids in Europe at the moment,” he says.
The planned UK factory would produce more than the Super Express trains. Contracts that the company has its eye on include Crossrail, for which it has been shortlisted, the electrification of the TransPennine region between Liverpool and Newcastle, which will require new stock, and the need for additional vehicles on the Edinburgh-to-Glasgow line.
Dormer says: “All of the operators in the UK are looking to expand their fleet. It’s pretty exciting in terms of the number of opportunities out there.”
These opportunities are not limited to conventional rail. Hitachi supplied the UK’s first domestic high-speed trains which run through Kent, linking the Channel tunnel to St Pancras International in London, and will have an interest in bidding for the High-Speed 2 contract.
Ongoing work in train design at Hitachi is looking for ways to reduce the use of energy. “Train weight is a key issue,” says Dormer. Another central concern is finding ways to reduce the whole-life cost of vehicles. Aside from these fundamental aspects, advances in design and technology are now taking a wider perspective that focuses on the passenger and their journey experience, says Dormer. Over time the requirements for information and energy within a rail vehicle have increased, so providing services such as wi-fi, power and air conditioning is important.
With trains set to last 30-35 years, they must accommodate future advances in technology. “People’s leisure used to be reading a book, now it’s reading a Kindle. Who knows, the next step could be reading something from the cloud,” explains Dormer.
Designers are working to ensure that passengers can download information to personal devices without any interference from radio waves, and to improve the continuity of mobile signals onboard trains. He says: “These are slightly different dimensions than what would have been looked at even five years ago.”
Of course, manufacturers do not have a crystal ball that will enable them to understand what train operators might want in the future, but creating modular designs that have built-in flexibility allows customers to adapt vehicles, he says.
Rail on the rise worldwide
“The manufacture of High-Speed 2 trains needs to be planned in advance so that the industry can gear up for it and deliver it efficiently,” says Graham Coombs, a director at the Railway Industry Association. “Difficulties come when there is no notice of delays on a project. This can cause a huge surge in demand and then long periods with no demand, which pushes up costs.
“We’d like to see much better clarity on the issue of future workload. It doesn’t have to be in minute detail, just an indication with some certainty and confidence that it will be carried out in a timescale. The key thing will be fitting this work in with the overall plan for the network. In the medium term, the construction programme includes the Crossrail fleet and the Inter-City replacement fleet, but there will be other fleet replacements coming up.
“We would like to see at least final assembly of High-Speed 2 in this country.
“The industry has problems with an ageing workforce and new technologies coming in. The existing workforce needs upskilling for these technologies and there is a need to get new people to replace the old ones as they leave. Everything from resignalling to electrification needs skilled people – and there is a big need, which we are trying to address. The more visibility of future workload there is, the more efficiently resources can be delivered.
“The railway market is good as there is investment right across the world, particularly in developing regions. There is no sign that demand for travel will decrease.
“If the Hitachi factory goes ahead, one of their aims is to target the European market. Companies within the UK supply chain hope they can form a valued part of this.”