You watch a movie streaming over the network or do some shopping. Looking at the platform, you notice the station is coping fine with the flow of passengers during rush hour. There’s a slight delay on the line, so a stream of personalised information arrives on your smart device, recalibrating your journey down to the final step. The days of silent service providers and route searches are over, thanks to big data and blockchain.
Have you got your ticket? Relax, that’s a trick question. Where we’re going, we don’t need tickets…
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In 2026, the first trains are due to roll out onto the ambitious HS2 railway network between London and Birmingham. This week, there were some major announcements about the Y-shaped system, which will link up not only these two cities but also Manchester and Leeds, creating an estimated 16,000 engineering jobs.
The talk to date has been mostly about the £6.6 billion of contracts awarded, the companies that won the business and the houses that will be demolished to make way for the high-speed trains. There is controversy over some of the firms involved, praise from the trade unions who see an opportunity for “British steel to shine” and fears of blown budgets and delays.
But an unexplored question is what kind of world the new trains will enter (assuming they are built on time) and how technology will impact railways around the world over the next 10 to 15 years? From on-board entertainment to supply chain, experts believe the changes will be soft but steady, gathering momentum along the tracks of time.
Building railways and buying trains is hugely expensive (in the case of HS2, over £50 billion) and the assets are expected to last. From the bullet trains in Japan to the Gautrain in South Africa, the fundamentals remain the same. And so, while modern trains are becoming more modular and interchangeable, the industry evolves slowly, making sure safety standards are kept.
“The industry has been somewhat risk averse, for obvious reasons, so changes take longer in rail than they do elsewhere,” explains John Easton, an engineer at the University of Birmingham. “You buy a train and you run it for twenty or thirty years.”
And yet Easton and others like him predict major technology-driven disruption.
Advances in autonomous driving and Artificial Intelligence will be substantial, Easton says, but human hands and minds will probably still be required to handle the unexpected, even in 2026. He adds that research will continue into powering trains with batteries or hydrogen, as well as dynamic energy, the idea of conserving power through motion (dropping off passengers without stopping by uncoupling coaches, for example).
Paper tickets will almost certainly be history within a decade, as mobile electronic payment formats, such as NFC (near field communication), proliferate. On-board Wi-Fi may be replaced by Li-Fi, which works on light and is much faster. Easton reckons companies will try maximising space inside trains by rethinking seating arrangements (experimenting with storable seats), there will be far more digitally-mediated services on offer and some visible changes to the designs of the trains and the materials being used. But if current trends continue, the real magic will be happening behind the curtains, where big data will be harvested, interpreted and applied across large-scale operations. This will affect everything from how quickly systems recover from faults to retail at stations, and from how operators (and even business rivals) share information to the physical behaviour of passengers making their daily journeys.
If hurdles around trust and privacy are overcome, train operators will be able to gather data from mobile phones or Fitbits to plan the supply of trains or to ease congestion during peak times. Walking to a more distant station, for example, could earn rewards.
Easton, who works with the Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education, says big data will allow for a wide spectrum of information to become really useful across platforms.
Within the time it takes to build HS2, what’s known as the semantic web could ripen and allow computer programmes (and the people using them) to better interpret and apply the mix of data flowing in from different sources. This could improve the ratio of data used in operational decisions.
Simply put, Easton explains, if you’re coding software for a recipe book, you don’t want to get tripped up by a word like “jelly”, which can mean a dessert in the UK or jam in America. The new generation tech will know exactly what context it’s working in and will help unlock the value of big data.
Blockchain looks set to play a big part too in the trains of tomorrow.
At its simplest, blockchain is an online ledger, which allows parties to conduct secure (encrypted) transactions without a middleman or a centralised authority. Each transaction is cryptographically recorded and stored, allowing for secure exchanges of value without pre-existing trust.
While blockchains are yet to overcome some major obstacles, ranging from institutional resistance to proving they can successfully scale up, real-life experiments (notably governments managing land registries) are underway and companies are investing in research. The economy around the new technology is booming, with warnings of a bubble similar to that experienced during the dot.com era.
When it comes to blockchain, some warn about massive job losses in the ranks of middlemen, while others see a future where objects (a locomotive, for instance) can develop a degree of autonomy, managing and paying for their own energy consumption, moving in sync with other network users and scheduling their own maintenance.
With exploration already underway into using blockchain to turn every connected device into a point of sale, the technology could change the way tickets are sold, perhaps on a per-kilometre basis, and allow payment in crypto-currencies.
Tom Kirkham, a computer scientist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Hartree Centre, believes the areas to watch are: sensor technology, retail surrounding train stations and the changing of human behaviour to relieve congestion and manage passenger flow. A key to this will be personal data, both shared (on social media) and collected (via networks or sensors).
“If you can change people’s behaviour, you can improve capacity on the railway as well,” Kirkham says. “If you can increase people’s travel at six o’clock rather than five o’clock, you can probably relieve some of the strain on the system. So maybe using that data and creating some form of incentive, maybe through something like Fitbit, to encourage people to walk to the station rather than taking the tube, could be one way of improving capacity.”
Experts like Easton and Kirkham, who specialises in big data and high-performance computing, see other potential applications for blockchain. For engineers interested in supply chain, blockchain could supplement or replace existing systems that track and authenticate physical components like a piece of steel or a wheel, or events taking place within a project like the HS2.
Smart contracts (programs that respond to real-world events) could ensure instant payment upon delivery, disputes could be settled faster and maintenance could become more targeted. Auditing would be reduced to looking at the blockchain record.
Mike Bursell, chief security architect at Red Hat, says the power would be in the detail. "What blockchain allows you to do is to look all the way down into the tiniest component. Where was it sourced? Down to the iron ore in the steel that was used to create the rails or to the electronic components in the signalling."
Bursell, an expert in blockchain, says maintenance records could include information on what parts where used, which engineer worked with them, what skills that particular engineer has and how up-to-date their training is.
"People think about blockchain and they think about Bitcoin or crypto-currencies. But there is a lot more to it. If you look at the more private blockchains, you can absolutely decide who sees what. That's where a lot of industries are showing interest, from sourcing wine and diamonds to the Internet of Things (IoT) and to shipping and the financial institutions."
For Easton, the “hot thing” that blockchains will do in the rail industry links to big data and is all about sharing information. He says operators tend to buy systems to serve a specific purpose, such as monitoring points, but the data collected is, potentially, of great value to other actors within the network. Train drivers and traffic controllers stand to benefit from instant access to such data, as could those coordinating the entire grid. But the difficulty in sharing information often comes down to profit, with no company wanting to share data that will help rivals make money.
“Blockchain can let you track data transactions between stakeholders,” says Easton. “So over time, you can build up a list of who is accessing what data, who is contributing what data into the network, and so you can use this as a basis for who has to pay what.”
Advances in these areas will translate into a lot more real-time information being fed through to the customer, whose only real interest is to make the intended journey with as little disruption as possible.
Kirkham’s colleagues at the STFC are developing systems to handle massive data storage, which will help with managing infrastructure, including transport.
Dr Erica Yang, who is involved in the big data project, says it comes down to breaking walls and gathering information that helps make better long-term decisions. In the case of HS2, she says, the trains would run for 50 or more years and the right decisions have to be made at the start.
“It’s important for organisations to consider the implications of big data, not only about storage but really thinking about the benefits of the data coming from different sensors, from the infrastructure itself, to help make decisions. Technology will have a crucial role to play in the journey.”
Whether blockchain’s potential is realised remains to be seen.
For now, if you’re still lost in the future glimpsed above, it’s time to climb off the train. Who knows, maybe your personal drone (they lift humans now, and are controlled by a blockchain) is standing by to fly you to your next destination.
* HS2 was invited to participate in this article but declined, saying it’s not ready to discuss specifics around its technology plans.