Tomorrow's Railway and Climate Change Adaptation Final Report

5.19 Task 4E Task 4E Metrics evaluation, identification
of dependencies
Task 4E provides an understanding of the dependencies of railway assets and operations
on other external systems. It also provides a framework for further holistic railway
system and sub-system analysis on a large scale.
It is recommended that that the external electricity supplies that lead to key railway
facilities should be identified and investigated in collaboration with the electricity
providers. Although they are not owned by the railway infrastructure owner or
operation companies, the impact of their failure on railway operations is huge. This
means that the railway industry should have great interest in this issue. In addition, as
the electrically powered generators rely on the railway to transport coal and biomass
from ports to them, it is recommended that consideration be given to setting up a forum
between the rail and electricity (generation and supply) industries. This will cultivate a
better understanding of interdependencies between them. Such an understanding can
improve the resilience of each industry.
The authors also recommend that ground water should be regarded as a potential risk
to the railway infrastructure and railway operations. Changes in the ground water level
and movements may be subtle in a short period of time. However, if changes build up,
they can affect the stability of geotechnical structures and cause landslips. We suggest
that the ground water level and movements around key geotechnical structures should
be monitored. It should be noted that it would take a long time to repair or reconstruct
geotechnical structures once they fail, so the impact of a failure could be enormous.
More attention should be paid to this issue.
Access transport systems (e.g. road networks and public transport systems) are
important to ensure the railway system is appropriately staffed. Each operational
department (e.g. drivers and control centre) may have a contingency plan, but it is
recommended that there should also be a cross-department system. This would
consolidate contingency plans and come into action in the case of the minimum turn-out
in each department. For example, this would enable the creation of a contingency
timetable based on both the desired service frequency and the possible/ required rates
of attendance of key staff including drivers, station staff and signal controllers. This in
turn would provide a railway system more resilient to disruption caused by extreme
weather conditions.
5.20 Task 4F Metrics evaluation, Drax/Immingham
case study
Based on the knowledge obtained through the series of sub-tasks in Task 4, we make
some recommendations for further knowledge-building work in order to realise a
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