Ep 29. Improving weather resilience across the UK's rail network, Dr Brian Haddock

Show Notes

On episode 29 of RTM's Track Talk podcast host Connor Fairhurst spoke with Dr Brian Haddock, Seasons and Climate Specialist for Transport Modes from Network Rail on how the rail industry can futureproof against extreme weather events and potential service disruption.

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0:00
You're listening to rail technology magazine's track top podcast to guide you through the news views and inside stories from across the rail industry. Welcome to this episode of rail technology magazines truck top podcast, where today we'll be discussing all things whether resilience, and what the industry can learn in this area from other countries. And we'll be joined by Dr. Brian haddock, head of seasonal and weather resilience at Network Rail. So thanks for joining us today on this podcast. So really pleasure to have you with us. Brian. Would you be able to tell us a bit about your role as head of seasonal and weather resilience and Network Rail and what it entails?

0:33
Course Yeah, thanks, Connor. Yeah, so I'm Brian haddock. I'm the head of the weather resilience at Network Rail within systems operator. And I chaired the industry seasonal challenge Working Group, which has representatives from all train operators, freight operators, Network Rail routes and regions. I'm also a visiting professor at Newcastle University and helping the delivery of the five key recommendations from the dangerous thingo report. Following Stonehaven. I have a team that sit at the at the kind of national perspective that support all routes and regions. And every route and region has a seasonal delivery specialist. And most have a seasonal Delivery Manager that oversees the sort of strategy, the seasonal planning and preparation and delivery throughout autumn, summer and winter. But enough we don't tend to focus on spring is a bit of time where we actually get rest by and do lots of reviews. I suppose the key part of my team are looking at seasonal assurance. So we we assure all the planning and processes for every season well in advance, though, I suppose I take it back. Every season, we undertake a National Review, and that that collates all the information from all the roots and regions reviews of what actually went on during their autumn during their summer during the winter. These reviews normally take place quite soon after the season. They bring in their train operators, and they bring in performance teams and freight operators. And they discuss what was good and what was bad about the season. And to be fair, they have monthly meetings, which are called Joint seasonal management group meetings. And some groups and regions have joined the seasonal management boards as well, that gets all locally gets reported to including all the operators and anything that might need that escalation at this for discussion. So once the reviews are taken place, all the lessons learned are captured. And they are built into the next seasons delivery and planning. And they're through working arrangements. So you have special working arrangements for each season. And that involves the control, because the control really at the sharp end of the delivery of each season anyway. So what we what we then have is, as we get closer towards the season, say sort of, you know, five, five or six months out, you have the seasonal Stage Gate process, which is a series of three stage gates. The first stage gate, as I said, will be kind of kicked off around sort of about the five month mark out. And it'll ask some basic questions about are you thinking about these key things. And that's for all delivery units, for train operators, for controls. And to do all the duty holders know that they're accountable for the delivery of each stage gate. And then if there are any risks that are identified at Stage Gate one, then there are plans put in place by stage gate to to make sure that those risks have been reduced. And obviously, if they continue, then a couple months out into Stage Gate through the final stage gate before the actual delivery of the season ahead. Then they're discussed, and they're put on a priority risk. And they're escalated to the network performance board, which oversee the sort of overall delivery of seasons and seasonality and industry level. And those risks are discussed. And plans are put in place to make sure that they're their best monitored over the period of that season. That's that's kind of the process of the stage gates. What we've what we have realised is that there are a number of things within those stage gates, which the assurance is quite dependent on trust. So there's, you know, there's a lot of questions in those Stage Gate processes, lots of things that delivery units have to sign off against. And there's a realisation that our own assurance process probably needs to be a little bit more robust. We do need to observe some of these activities, which we currently don't do. We need to make sure that they are being undertaken, even at a very basic level, given that there isn't always resources to do all of this stuff. and some of the is currently done by remote condition monitoring, for instance, rather than actual visual inspections.

5:08
And there is a, there's a plus and a minus for that. So we obviously don't want to put more people out in the track. But at the same time, we do need to make sure that we're getting the right information to give us the risk profile three season for every point of that season, especially given the forecast that we get. So yeah, that there's a general overview of the seasonal Stage Gate process, there's a lot more to it. There's an integrated weather management plan that has all the high risks that sit within that aid meme Wi Fi like, within the control, and any given forecast will alert certain thresholds as extreme or adverse, if they're extreme, over a period of, you know, 24 hours in the forecast, then the controlled root Control Manager will check all the high risk sites against that weather parameter. So for instance, if it would be heat in the southeast, it might cause some desiccation of earthworks in the long term, they would have to look to see whether there's any engineering work that's going on. If it's extreme heat, then there's a potential that the line can't be moved, you can't take out bits of rail if it's going to get too hot. And equally, if there's work going on, that are stressing the route, they've got to check that things can be stressed or non stressed, depending on the temperature outside, and whether you should actually move the rail at all or the ballast. So there's all those thoughts to be considered.

6:38
You know, you talk about forecaster, but how do you work around that? Because obviously, forecasts can only tell you so much. How do you make yourself and Network Rail prepared for any eventuality when it comes to weather and seasonality?

6:49
That's a good question. So over the years, we've built the Network Rail Weather Services site, and it's currently by our forecast provider met desk. And we have six weekly meetings with Matt desk where we review the current situation we review the current forecast, and we look to see what tools that we've got and how we might develop them based on learning from incidents, and from general seasonality, but local level and at national level. And we've built a lot of bespoke tools in that forecasting kit. So for instance, we've got a bespoke forecasting tool for conductor oil for the southern region and Farmersville. In particular, we have bespoke forecasting for overhead line equipment. And obviously, that's a lot to do with temperature ranges. But equally, we've got things like overtopping forecasts down at dollar sea level, so that if we get high tides mixed with, you know, high winds, for example, certain times of year, especially at spring tides, then the forecast will recognise that that hits a certain threshold, and then we can talk to the train operators to make sure that the mitigations are in place. I mean, for example, the overtopping at dawlish seawall would mean that we would work the normal upline which is against the clips, that could be run as bi directional so that they can run trains in both directions, closest to the rocks, ie not closest to the seawall where you might get overtopping which causes all sorts of problems if you have see watch over the top trains. So that there are things like that that are bespoke, and that have been built up over the years. And a lot has been built up from learning from incidents to create those bespoke forecasts. And equally, there's a lot of consultation with train operators to deal with specific fleet types and their vulnerabilities. There's a lot of learning from December 2010, with ingressive Whetstone to traction motors, for example, in line speeds, so that we know to reduce, reduce to train speed or high speeds when we know we've got wetter, snow forecasted, for example, the wrong type of snow. And so there's a lot of lessons learned been built there. And that that also goes into this seasonal planning around making sure that there are goals is fitted on, you know, traction motors within depots so that it doesn't ingress that wet snow at high speed.

9:19
But yeah, so that a lot of those forecasting services have been built up over years. I mean, for example, we've got the attention forecast as well, which creates the index. And interestingly enough, that's also that's also got incident data built into it. So when you get to sort of the back end of October into early November, we know at that point, that's when you got mostly for coming down. Obviously it varies within a few weeks and the parameters depending on frost, wind speed, etc. So if you get a sharp frost towards the end of October into November, and then you know you've got winds forecast beyond that, then the model automatically works. out that your leaf fall risk is quite high. And he actually provides a percentage of leaf fall risk at a root level. And that does vary across the UK, we find out that, you know, Scotland tend to get the fall very early on compared to the south. So there's lots of regional variations. One of the problems we've got Connor, to be totally honest, is having national thresholds. There. Currently, we've got a national threshold for rainfall. But actually, you can't compare the rainfall in the northwest and in Scotland, to parts of the southeast and Anglia. They're just, you know, that they're not comparable. So we are doing a lot of work at the moment with the Mets office, to work out those parameters with our asset managers at local level to understand the impact on individual assets, certainly earthworks, you know, what is the impact over there compared to their, to our passengers are afraid users they don't care, they just don't want to be delayed. So actually, rather than think of kind of root level, the seasonal challenge Steering Group, which is a kind of strategy formation of a 10 year strategy, or working very closely with lots of research, as John backfoot, UCL and Loughborough are working out how do we model these at a local level. And we call them operational route sections, where it's basically station to station, and then you aggregate that risk up into service group levels. And we are starting to get to a point where we can quantify the impact on individual passenger services and freight services, and actually provide information about what the timetable should be to reflect that delay. So that in advance, you can work out the impact on the entire service group. So the operator with the Network Rail route, can decide what timetable that might look like. And that would be based on the forecast. And in the past, it's been difficult to call that on the forecast because as you said, sometimes the forecast isn't, isn't as accurate, or, you know, weather systems tend to, you know, do what they want, they sort of turn up, and they might sit around the edge of the railway for hours and not affect the railway. And then or where it's been forecasted slow moving somewhere suddenly moves slightly to the left or right or that system. And suddenly, you've got the rail network, which is essentially a thread through that big geographical forecast area. So we're getting quite clever trying to understand forecasting for the actual rail network itself, rather than the geographical forecast area. But the biggest development in this area, we'll be looking at how we can use topography, and the effects over the the kind of geology of that area, which is all very different across the UK, as you know, and to understand the impact of that on bespoke forecasting services, and risk, so that you come up with a quantified risk for specific areas, rather than looking at large geographical forecast areas. That's tricky. But we have started to do that. And as I said, the seasonal agnostic railway model, the Psalm is starting to understand what that looks like and the quantification of impact. That's currently under trial in the western route between reading a Newbery and has already started to provide some interesting information in regards to what the impact might be on a specific train in a specific timetable, and then the impacts of that. But of course, the beauty of start to understand that at the local level and a granular level, individual head codes means that you can see what actually is available. Network Rail and train operators have got bad press about this over the years to do a forecast because essentially what we currently do, certainly for wind, we will blanket emergency speed. So we've just put on a big speed between there and now reduce, you know, the speed of the train. And to reduce the risk of it hitting something, essentially a tree, which is generally the issue with wind, although also we get trampolines and bits of stuff all over the over headline equipment as well, even stables. So what this model starts to do is it realises that that might only be a part of the network where you can still be running over here. We've not done that before, we've tended to look at a much more sort of generic, larger geographical area. But I look looking at individually, we can see that that one train might be impacted but the one after might not be because the systems pass through. It might not be as bad as first forecasted on the observed data, and that you actually provide information in advance to the passengers that their journey might be simply coming through. They're changing at one point, though, we're getting we're getting there. It's slowly but the model and the information is starting to tell us this and it also there's a machine learning element and AI within this model that will really start to define in the future, that the best options are available to the controller when they're trying to make a decision about what trains to run, and which ones not to run.

15:11
And you spoke there about the innovation we've seen in your area of expertise. But how important is further innovation and kind of replace that experience you've built up over the years?

15:20
That's really interesting, corrosive. So there's a few questions in there, we haven't got billions and billions of pounds to invest in the railway. Nobody has, and certainly in this current climate, so what we do is resilience to me is being seasonally agnostic, I'm not keen on the term itself, but it's the agreed term under the industry. But what it's essentially saying is that we're not going to be resilient to every extreme weather event, we just can't be. There's so many unknowns in there, especially about our own asset condition. And the way is impacted by extreme weather and with climate change. But what we do know is that we've often run services when perhaps we shouldn't have done, sometimes we've run trains at reduced speed for long periods of time, because we will wrote about the overall risk because the forecast isn't granular enough. And what we're trying to do now is become more resilient in that the timetable is true to the impact that we're going to experience. And that for me is real resilience, because it then provides information to the passengers, that actually these are the service that will be run on a forecast. Rather than simply look at the forecast. Yes, it looks bad there. Start cutting trains out the timetable, the controls are under immense pressure. At the time, they're dealing with incidents ongoing, and at the same time, they're still trying to work out train services, what they should be doing with stock and crew, if you've already got that pre planned, and you can only ever have that pre planned, if it's quantified impact. If you know the impact, then you can start to understand that, you know, resilience might be about running the train service that's fit for the forecast. And that's very different from running, you know, services where we're cancelling stuff off, because suddenly we're into the middle of it, and what we term out of control situations, which is borrowed from an academic document around the railways in Holland, where a lot of research has been done on this. And we have learned a lot from Holland actually, I've worked very closely with pro rail and NS on their forecasting systems and, and how they divide their network into four zones might be five, which basically means that they can, they can alter the timetable, basically four hours in advance, I don't think we're there yet with the UK rail. It's a very different structure, obviously, over here in the UK. But there's a lot of lessons to be learned about that, and providing the passengers with true information about what services are actually running in advance. Of course, the risk is, sometimes you might get that wrong. And that will be the bit that gets remembered. But generally, most days the controllers do this in their head. And as you said, you know, the experience, tacit knowledge is incredible. And again, that will be part of the sub model that we're building with Professor John Blackford.

18:11
You mentioned they're learning from the Netherlands. And I've been writing recently about what the real industry can learn from you, but But what things are happening on the continent that can help improve weather and seasonal resilience on the UK Israel network?

18:24
So that's an interesting, very interesting question caller, one of the things that stands out for me at the moment is forecasting. So probabilistic forecasting is something that the Met Office have been looking at. For some time. Now. We don't actually use it currently under Network Rail weather services. But we have used ensemble forecasting for some time. So that does pick up bits of probabilities. At the moment, most most transport industry use deterministic forecasting, based on deterministic modelling. Now, we've started to learn from Germany, with the Met Office doing a trial over there on probabilistic forecasting. And we've created with Professor Paul Davis from the Met Office, a decide at all was called a decider at all. And that gives you a probabilistic idea of what the weather looks like over a longer period of time into the future. And they call this the weather regimes changing weather regimes. Often it isn't actually the extreme weather that catches us out. It's the change between the weather systems that catches us out. Generally, the first hot day in the UK catches us out. By the time we get around to the second or third week of a good summer where our performance levels are getting better and better. So it's understanding how you catch that before you get caught up. Even though we do all this assurance. There's still the element of surprise. I think there's also a few technological solutions that we've looked to your for the magnetic track break. So a lot of A lot of countries use magnetic track brakes. Very, very handy for autumn because it means that you can use an emergency and the train really does stop, stop. It doesn't matter how much contamination you've got and railhead. An MTB magnetic track base will help you fill up quickly. Anyone that's travelled on a tram knows that because most tram systems even in the UK, are fitted with them, as are tied in with Metro. I think that's a big revision of the entire industry that because we'd have to really rethink what we're going to do with magnetic track boats because it affects the signalling systems in the UK. That's quite difficult. I think there's a price for them. But there's a lot of learning, perhaps from Europe, and also specification of new train design. So new trains that come into the UK, I think there's a there's an opportunity there for those that are fitted with specific things that they used to in Europe, and other countries with extreme weather that are often not available to us in the UK, because they're not designated as as required. But with climate change, and extremes and frequency of weather events. There may be an opportunity there. There's other things as well. So the adhesion modifiers the things that do clean the railhead in autumn plasma plasma tracks, very interesting. So that's something that we're looking at from the US where they actually clean the railhead with a plasma beam. And so there are a lot of things in the mix, but a lot of them are being tested roots and regions quite vigorously and also around supply chain operations. Who ran all the multipurpose vehicles for adhesion modifier and water jetting in autumn through two MPVs. That anti ice and D Ice in winter, though, yeah, technologically as a few things, but I would say probably the forecasting systems that are being trialled in Germany are probably critical, and we're working with Met Office to to see that one through.

22:01
It's been a real pleasure speaking with you today, Brian, and thanks for your time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Real technology magazine's track top podcast. Join the conversation on social media or get in touch via the link on our website and stay up to date with all the latest developments in the rail industry. Subscribe and give us a rating and your preferred streaming platform. This has been around technology magazine's track top podcast. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

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