Tomorrow's Railway and Climate Change Adaptation Final Report

We have highlighted any Phase 1 recommendations considered a relatively ‘quick win’
for the GB railway to implement or benefit from in Section 4.
3.1 Whole system
3.1.1 Changes to current practice
The GB rail industry collects and uses vast amounts of data and information - both
weather-related and otherwise - from many different sources. However, it often ends up
in different places or ‘silos’ with varying degrees of consistency and accuracy. Given the
GB rail industry’s complex history, the existence of these ‘information silos’ and the
variations in consistency and accuracy are perhaps to some degree inevitable. However,
changing current practices to improve collation and integration of data and information
could have significant advantages in terms of assessing and increasing the GB railway
system’s resilience to weather and climate change. Examples of this principle are
included in the relevant sub-sections throughout Sections 3.1 – 3.9.
A general recommendation is to improve the monitoring and recording of local weather
conditions across the network. Alongside incident reporting requirements, this would
assist when analysing specific weather and climatic impacts on particular railway assets
and asset vulnerabilities. In particular, it is recommended that increasing the quantity
and quality (consistency and accuracy) of recorded weather condition observations at
sites where asset failures and weather-related operational delays occur.
Network Rail has previously installed a number of new weather stations along its routes
as part of a trial; however the cost of installing and properly maintaining these was
considered insufficiently beneficial when there are already readily available high
resolution, high quality weather data from commercial sources. Research is being
undertaken to assess whether there are deficiencies in the openly available dataset that
would warrant dedicated weather stations in areas where the infrastructure is
particularly vulnerable. This initiative should be continued so that comprehensive and
meaningful data is collected and collated for current operational reasons as well as
future research purposes.
Meteorological data is being combined with incident data from both Network Rail and
other parts of the railway industry, to begin to look at whole-system weather resilience
issues. This could be extended to include data from Train Operating Companies (TOCs),
suppliers and passenger attitude surveys.
Consideration should be given to consistently identifying the location of vulnerable
assets or systems within the context of the wider GB railway system. This should be
followed by analysis of critical interdependencies and any business continuity
management systems or procedures which may need to be updated.
There is extensive best practice guidance relating to the preparation for and
management of winter weather in the new RSSB Winterisation guide (GE GN 8628 -
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