Tomorrow's Railway and Climate Change Adaptation Final Report

• Often, potential engineering solutions are known but not implemented because of
cost, approval processes and risk-averse culture. It can be the application and
governance that is lacking, rather than the technological solution itself.
• The search for solutions should consider more than just the rail sector:
o
It may be more appropriate to work with environment agencies (e.g. EA
in England and SEPA in Scotland) to protect an entire area or work with
Local Authorities on green infrastructure, rather than solely focusing on
making the rail infrastructure more resilient. Flooding is an issue
affecting more than just the railway.
• Comparisons between road and rail infrastructure are useful:
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o
o
o
Rail has less redundancy than road
The material construction of rail infrastructure tends to be older than
that of major road infrastructure (e.g. motorways)
The geological composition of rail embankments is often unknown
A strategy combining a number of different approaches is normally
more effective at reducing risk than one ‘solution’.
• A ‘what if’ approach can sometimes be used to point to solutions. For example: what
if one had to design a railway system to operate in 40°C? How would this differ from
the current situation? This advocates a ‘scenario’ approach, which is being used
elsewhere in T1009 Phase 2, such as Task 1.
• There could be merit in assessing in more detail the relevance of particular weather
or climate resilience measures in particular places. For example, there was relatively
little information gathered in this exercise on the topic of landslides and slope
stability. It is not clear, however, whether this was simply due to under-sampling of
the problem in the analysis which we undertook, or whether the issue is genuinely
not a large problem in GB.
• With regard to this specific example, the extent to which similar geological issues are
present in other countries should be investigated (for example over-consolidated
clays). This would assess whether there is knowledge elsewhere, or whether the
problem is peculiar to the GB railway.
The Task 2C compendium has sought to summarise all the information gathered during
Task 2 which is pertinent to comparable overseas railway systems’ management of
weather resilience and climate change adaptation measures. The compendium is highly
unlikely to be exhaustive. However, it provides substantial material for consideration by
GB railway stakeholders in terms of what can be learned for the GB railway’s future
management of, and resilience to, weather in a changing climate.
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