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Welcome to the Rail Technology Magazine Podcast. Keeping you up-to-date with the most current rail industry news, giving you an all-access pass to the key insights and innovations helmed by the decision makers in our industry
I always liken us to the biggest fire brigade in the world. The minute something goes wrong, we're really good at putting it right. What I like and what we do with the helicopters now is we're taking the matches off the arsonist so we find it before it really goes wrong.
We surveyed 140 sets of points in one flight. Bearing in mind the helicopters did flee up for a couple of hours. That's more than a set of points per minute. And we found six faults on that one flight alone.
We generally operate between 801,000ft and ah, we could operate higher 800ft. We could read point numbers, switch numbers, we can read all of that. So higher is better for us.
This is the Rail technology magazine podcast bringing you views, insight and conversation from leaders across the rail industry. Hello, welcome to the Rail technology magazine podcast with me, Peter Johnson. I'm delighted to say I'm joined today by two guests. We've got Bradley Sparks, he's the head of air operations at Network Rail, and Sean Leahy, who's the national aerial survey specialist and a qualified drone operator. We're going to be chatting today about the air operations team at ah, Network rail. A team of helicopters and drones. They get up there in the sky and they identify any issues that we may have on our rail network and they identify them and they solve them before they cause any delays or disruption. Absolutely fantastic. Fascinating topic that we'll be discussing today, but you don't want to hear from me, you want to hear from the two men themselves. So I want to throw it over to Bradley and Sean now and ask them to explain what it exactly is that they do in their role. So we'll begin with you, Bradley. hello to you. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Would you like briefly just to explain what you do in your capacity then as the head of air operations at Network rail?
Yeah, no problem. First of all, thanks for having us on, Peter. It's a pleasure to be on here and talk about all the exciting stuff we do. So, yeah, so I'm the head of air operations. fairly new to the team, actually. started in this role in January this year I head up a team that kind of primarily goes out and captures data using helicopters, but also using drones. and we also facilitate the use of drones by our colleagues across the routes and regions as well. So, far and wide, across the whole of the UK, it's a fantastic kind of capability, on both sides, really started out with the helicopters primarily. We can do some amazing things with a variety of sensors so we can go around capturing track information, off track data. we have a suite of different sensors from thermal imaging cameras, a kind of military spec to use standard kind of point and shoot cameras. And then on the drones we're seeing similar capabilities developing rapidly over year after year. And that's a really exciting space as well. So that's generally what we do. And Sean, I'm really excited to pass you over to Shaun's, the man in the air most weeks capturing that data for us.
Yeah. Hi Peter. Ah, hi listeners. again, just iterating what Bradley said. Thanks for having us on here. We don't really get to blow our own trumpet very often about what we do. People say, oh, network rail with helicopters, what do you do, fly first class passengers about? No, you know, we're not a taxi service, we very rarely have passengers on board, because every passenger we take is 30 minutes of fuel that we could actually use. So going back to what Bradley says, so I'm the national aerial Survey specialist, one of a team of the six of us. We have two helicopters, one in Scotland and one for the rest of the country. we do ah, a variety of tasks. we always find it quite funny that the camera system, one of the camera systems we use is actually more expensive than the helicopter. we have some new capabilities coming on board which, we'll talk about later on. But yeah, I liken us, you know, I've worked in the railway industry 38, 39 years nearly. And the railway industry is a great industry and you know, Network Rail is a really good company but I always liken us to the biggest fire brigade in the world the minute something goes wrong. We're really good at putting it right. What I like and what we do with the helicopters now is we're taking the matches off the arsonist so we find it before it really goes wrong. Give the teams on the ground time to get in there, get the possessions and get it sorted before it becomes a problem to the travelling public and to our freight customers.
And Sean, I understand that you've kind of been involved with this project, with this department since its inception. I don't know how it came about or when Network Rail first decided that they needed a fleet of helicopters, but could you just give me a little bit more about that background about when the air operations team was set up and kind of what your portfolio has been from the start, really.
yeah. So as far as I remember, in fact the lady Wendy Welsh, who has worked in the industry. She's retired now and she was station manager here at Waterloo. So that was quite, fitting that I'm here at Waterloo. it was a chance corridor conversation between Wendy Welsh and a former CEO, Ian Coucher. Wendy was a helicopter pilot and he said, do you think we could use helicopters to survey the railway? So Wendy looked at it, looked at getting a contract set up, a short contract. I was the area off track engineer for Wessex, which is the greatest area in the world. I don't care what anybody else says. And I know if anybody's listening from Scotland, I know I say Scotland's the best as well, but I work up there as well. But at the time, Wessex was the greatest area in the world. so I used to use the helicopter for inspections, for doing vegetation inspections. You can get out there, you can cover a hell of an area with a helicopter. The, problem we had was, everybody that was operating the camera was a volunteer. They were primarily from an operations background. So they couldn't speak to engineers in engineers terms. Now, some of them could, but most of them couldn't. And because it wasn't their day job, by the time they got to use the camera, they'd forgotten how to use it. So you lost quite a considerable amount of time whilst they relearn the camera system. And then, of course, that would be on Monday, Tuesday, you would have a different person and you would go through that whole iteration. So I voiced my concerns to Wendy. If you want to make this a proper operation, we've got to do it properly. So she said, well, what will you do? Then I went, easy, let's get rid of all the observers, which is exactly what we did. And I know there is probably an effigy of me somewhere with pins in it for doing it, but it was probably the best move we did. I took a leap of faith and came over and joined Wendy. And I was trained up on the camera system and then another colleague of mine who's now also since retired, Howard Nader. there was the two of us for the whole country. And, because I was an ex permanent, way engineer, ex third rail engineer, and Howard was an ex overhead line engineer, we started seeing the benefits immediately. It was right. We know what that fault is. We know what we've got to do. We know who we've got to get it to. So we started to see the benefits coming in. And now that team of the two of us has, spread to six with two helicopters.
So I understand as well that, you know, you talk about that you used to have camera operators who weren't really able to communicate with the, with the engineers and you've talked about how you've changed that. But I believe as well there's a very specific set of qualifications. You actually need to be part of the air operations team and to be, to be licenced to, you know, to be in the helicopters and to operate the drones. Could you just speak a little bit to that then? Because I understand that it is, you know, you do have to be an extremely qualified person to be part of this team.
Yeah. I mean, from the helicopter side of it we have to abide by two sets of rules. We have to abide by network rails, lifesaving rules and we have to abide by CAA rules. It's not as glamorous as everybody thinks. You know, you spend most of your time away from home, wherever the helicopter is and it's not a case of looking out the window. My whole world is a screen probably no bigger than this laptop. And you know, to constantly be watching that. a lot of people suffer from spatial disorientation and the easiest way to describe it is go and sit in a bar and drink sambuca and then get off the bar stool. and you just go to pieces because your brain thinks that you're not actually moving yet. The world around you is spinning round and moving. So there's that side of it. You have to be, you know, we have to have a counter terrorism clearance. We fly over some very sensitive sites. We have exemptions to go over these sites. But it's not only that we get asked to cover certain movements sometimes. we were very active during what was Operation London Bridge which unfortunately the, the passing of her majesty, the queen. We were part of Operation golden orb which was the king's coronation. so there's a lot that goes into it and the camera system isn't easy to use. Whilst it has got the most expensive PlayStation controller in the world it is coordinating everything you see on the screen with what's outside and you're constantly backwards and forwards. So it's you know, it's not, it's not for everyone, I think is the way to put it. And of course it's not just the flying. The minute you finish, you know, flying then it's all the collating the faults, getting them out to the right people, you know, making sure that everything that you've seen goes back to and gets to the right, people, so they can action it. Bradley, do you want to talk about the drone side? Because I know that's.
Yeah, no, I was just going to shout, yeah. With the national aerial survey specialists, we're really open minded as well. There are some certain criteria and you need ahead for heights. you need kind of to be able to stomach it. Literally stomach, working in that environment. As Sean kind of touched upon. There are. It's not for everybody. And I think you've seen some people who go quite queasy, haven't you, Sean? Sick m bags are provided just for full disclosure. But, yeah, so we're really open minded. Like I think previous survey experience or aerial survey experience in particular is really helpful. So if we were ever advertising, to fill one of those roles, that's something we would look for. But equally we are open minded. I think bringing track experience helps as well because ultimately we've got people out there looking at the infrastructure, and we need to. It takes time to train somebody new to the company to know what they're looking at. so we're quite pragmatic with it. you can come at it from different angles. You can train somebody that's not familiar the rail, infrastructure.
And they maybe have all the camera skills or the aerial survey skills, but you're training them fundamentally about the rail infrastructure itself and what actually they're looking at. What is that? You know, what is a fault if you were looking at a thermal camera? Is that element of the, or component of the overhead line equipment meant to be hot or is that just normal kind of conditions and then vice versa. If you've got somebody that is familiar with the railway but doesn't have that experience on board an aircraft, it's a slightly different approach. So, there's that, we use a lot of camera equipment. So kind of an idea of, photography fundamentals really helps. we do find that, And I think generally speaking, the majority of our team are really interested in photography. They do that as a pastime as well. And, it's as much a science as it is not. So, Yeah, that definitely helps. in terms of the drone element of things, that really. A number, large number of colleagues across the organisation do that for us. They have that capability. You have to go on a specialist course, it's about a week in length. you kind of practise your skills, hone your skills actually flying the things, but you also learn about the regulations, the camera equipment on board, the drones, various different elements. Meteorology, there's, so many different things to it. You even learn about space weather. So we've recently seen, some lovely auroras in the UK. Well, actually, that has an influence on our satellite signals, on our drones. So how is that influencing the safety of our drone operations? There's so many different elements to it that you wouldn't perhaps consider on the face of it. So, the training to be a drone pilot is available to a large number of colleagues or people even out working for contractors. and it's a great capability for asset inspection, surveys, all manner of different applications. It's a really amazing technology.
So once you've got these qualifications, then you move on to the next step, which we'll go into a little bit more detail now, which is the actual being up in the air with your drone or in the helicopter and all the different sorts of operations you may be, tasked with doing. You mentioned just there, your thermal images survey. And I understand as well that you do surveys, obviously after bad weather, to make sure nothing's been damaged. Would you be able to talk me through, just some of these examples of the types of survey that you might be requested to do and the sorts of things that you are looking for?
Yeah, sure. so just to reiterate what Bradley said, we, as national air research, we're platform agnostic, so it's not. We don't say. All right, let's all pile in the helicopter and off we go. We'll look at, what's the best solution and, the most cost effective solution for the problem. If it's a site that needs regular, updating, your drone is your best option because you know the site's not going anywhere. if you want to do four or 500 miles, then the helicopter is your best option. So, route proving after storms is something that we do an awful lot of. In fact, we've had a, because I work primarily in Scotland, we've had a 92% increase in callouts for route proving. And, what we find, it saves the railway. we are now looking at route proving in the hours of darkness because it can be done. we've done a test, we did trials, we made sure that everybody was happy with the footage we were, getting from the system. This will enable us to open the railway quicker for our customers, and safer as well. we have an ever diminishing resource. and we're not here to replace people. We're here to enhance what our teams on the ground do, and make sure they can do it safely. So route proving it m it's a real godsend for the railway. We attend the emergency weather action team meetings the day before and they'll tell us exactly where they want us to go and we could be in from any time from 03:00 in the morning onwards to go out there and start getting the railway open again. thermal imaging tasks is, a really interesting task. You can probably guess half the time we won't take engineers on board because the amount of times I've had an engineer whisper in my ear, oh, there's a fault there and you go, no, it's not, it's a pigeon. But don't worry, it's going to fly off in a minute. and that's no offence to engineers because they're not used to seeing it. but again, we can cover 3400 miles in a day, where my colleagues with drones, it would take them probably a week, maybe longer to do that. So it's about, it's horses for courses. one thing we're really good at is point heating surveys. so we're qualified to switch the point heating on to override the point heaters so we're not clogging up the system with requests to override them. So we go, we work our flight plan out, switch the point heating on and out we go. And I know there's remote monitoring systems out there that will tell you the voltage. but we've got plenty of examples where the point heating is on, but it's in a bush because the team had been out the night before or the week before, changed a half set of switches and hadn't reconnected to point heaters. you know, people would think, oh yeah, it's fine, the voltage is fine on there, but actually, yeah, it's heating up the bushes. Lovely. But it's not doing anything for the railway, so. And we can feed back live, we can contact, control. We use the pinpoint app, which, is, a really good app for network rail. So we can take photographs, link them straight in and then fire it straight back to control, via the 4G network, so they know, they can see exactly what we've seen. You're not relying on one person's interpretation. You send the photograph, everybody looks at it and they can make an informed decision rather than. Well, yeah, as it used to be way back in the day, but now it's an informed decision and go, right, well, we photographed it yeah, let's do some quick measurements. It's fine. So it is really a godsend with what we do.
Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on the point heating one. We talk about our service offering all the time internally. And, the point heating one in particular is really interesting. So we go out proactively in the autumn. turn these things on, make sure they're working, because obviously you get very cold weather conditions pointing to heating doesn't work. Trains ultimately don't move where they need to move. and that can be a big operational issue. But I was looking at one case study earlier. We did some flights last autumn in Nottingham, the Nottingham area, and we surveyed 140 sets of points in one flight. So bearing in mind the helicopter is typically up for a couple of hours, that's more than a set of points per minute. and we found six faults on that one flight alone. So there is this conception sometimes that the helicopter can be quite expensive. You work out the cost per hour and yeah, on the face of it, it can be very expensive. But when you divide the number of assets that costs for one or 2 hours of flying, you divide the number of assets that you're surveying by that cost, or, vice versa. M it's actually very cost effective. And there are some clear safety benefits as well because the conventional method of inspecting those assets is to send somebody physically on the track to go and look at them. so, yeah, as well as bringing some efficiencies, we also like to think that we bring some real kind of safety benefits as well.
Just before we move on, then that was something I actually was going to move on to at some point. But as we've touched on it now, it makes sense really to deal with it at the minute. so could you talk a little bit more about the safety aspect, and not necessarily just the safety aspect of removes people from the railway side, but also there are very specific kind of safety concerns that operating helicopters and drones raise as well. For example, I know, I've read that you're not allowed within so many tens or hundreds of metres, I can't quite remember, of assets and things like that. Very many kind of safety requirements and hoops you've got to jump through as well.
Yeah, I mean, I can talk from the perspective of flying a drone near the rail network. we get questions about this all the time and we have a standard in place. that kind of has some kind of. Some, how to put it, some limitations in terms of how close you can operate near the railway. They're actually quite loose in my opinion. So you can fly, particularly if you're an internal operator or a framework contractor, you can fly as close as five metres horizontally away from the open railway m and then you can fly down to 20 metres above track. That's the kind of lowest height that we permit drone operations. the main considerations around that are ah, you've got the fleet of different trains, freight and passenger trains moving along the network all the time. we don't quite understand, particularly with the bigger drones, what the impact of something hitting a train like a windscreen might have. So there's some stuff around that. But what we do know is that particularly where you get freight trains, with kind of shipping containers missing. So where you get a gap in the train that can cause real issues with turbulence. So if you fly too drone too close, that can cause almost like a bit of a vacuum effect that sucks the drone into the track and can cause a collision between the drone and the track or between the drone and the passing train. So there's some stuff in there where you wouldn't want to get too close. Anyway, there's considerations like that. There's also the consideration of having trap workers still in that rail environment. And there are certain regulations from the civil aviation authority around how close you can fly to uninvolved people. So we like to make sure that our pilots remain aware of that, aware of the proximity from uninvolved people with regards to kind of passengers and just members of the public as well. kind of close to our railway domain. And then on the helicopters. Yeah, there's. You're absolutely right. You know, it's There's a good kind of safety record with our supplier and with various helicopter operators, but there is definitely an elevated element of risk. so we're always mindful of that and I think that's where we start to look increasingly in the future at beyond visual line of sight capabilities with drones. So basically, basically uncrewed aircraft, you know, you could have a big aircraft that could fly well in the next year or two, three years, several tens of kilometres potentially. And then in the even longer term, you're potentially talking about hundreds of miles similar to helicopters. So that's something we always keep our eye on and we're. Yeah, something we're cognizant of.
Yeah. Just to go back to the helicopters, Peter, you know, we fly with a twin engine helicopter. It's redundancy. We can So in the air navigation order there's a thing called article five which states how far you must be from people, property, vehicle and vessel. we have an exemption against that but our sensors are so good we really don't need to come down that low. we generally operate between 801,000ft and we could operate higher, 800ft. We can read point numbers, switch numbers, we can read all of that. So higher is better, for us. And we very rarely use the exemption to come down lower, unless somebody specifically wants us to film next to a train on the west Highland line where it's quite quiet. But yeah, higher is better for us.
Brilliant. Now, I just want to return to a point that Bradley mentioned a few minutes ago, something I was planning to bring up anyway. But you gave an example of when you were surveying points in Nottingham and you saw, you surveyed 140 sets of points and you found faults on six. Now one question I had for you really was on that. Are your, the aerial surveys that you do, are they proactive? is that 1 may have been or are they reactive? Do you wait to hear about a potential fault before you go out and explore it? Or are you going out kind of proactively trying to look for the faults before anyone else really picks up on them and fixed them before they cause any kind of issue?
Yeah, so we do both. Actually most of our stuff is proactive. we will get reactive calls, especially. I'm m speaking from the team up in Scotland, but we will get reactive calls following storms. Can you go out and look at this? But we will also have made sure. So we do very proactive flights for earthwork surveys. So each week we have a separate set route that we fly. Just looking at embankment issues, things that you would never think would affect the railway like farmers ploughing their fields the wrong way. so they carry them towards the railway. We can feed that back. We can't tell a farmer which way to plough is field but we can advise them of the consequences. so, you know, so we do the proactive side. We do the proactive side with the booster transformers. so booster transformer surveys on the west coast and the east coast main line. Again, you know, you'll need a team of men or a team of people to go out there and at night. So it's a, it's an isolation, it's a possession, it's mobile, work platforms. You don't get to see the asset under load. and it can work anything out up to five, 6000 pound a booster. if we go out and do it. It works at about 72 pound and we're doing it live. So as trains are going through, we'll see if there's any draw on the current. So yeah, it is. Getting back to your initial question is a mixture of proactive and reactive. When we're called, we'll go. But nine times out of ten we're on a reactive, we're on a reactive server, a proactive survey anyway. and we do certain assets at certain times of the year as well. So as Bradley was saying, come August we'll be looking at the point heating, getting everybody ready for winter and then during the winter months we will do proactive patrols if the weather's cold enough to make sure that point heating is still working because just because you've tested it once, how many times you've gone to mow the grass and the lawn mower starts the first time and then two weeks later it doesn't start. So it's all about that, making sure we're on top of everything, and feeding that information back to the teams on the ground.
Yeah, just to build on that as well. So from both angles, actually with drones and helicopters we find applications for the technology from both an operations perspective and a maintenance perspective. So we've talked a lot about maintenance. one thing that we have ongoing in the drone space is some trials around response to trespass because that has a massive impact on our rail users, on fairpayers as well as the movement of freight and various other movements on the railway. so the quicker we can respond to a reported trespass incident, first of all, there's a safety consideration. We can get somebody to respond to that potentially intervene and make the whole situation safer for that person that's potentially in a risky environment. But second of all, we can get passengers and freight moving a lot more quickly. So we're looking at as the kind of regulations and technology evolves, we're looking at kind of automated drones, and how they may be used and feed back information to a control centre. So we have the National Operation Operations Centre or more a local operation centre, how we can feed that intelligence into those centres and I think that's a really exciting space at the moment.
Now I understand another one of the things that you do as well is that you work with internal customers across all of your routes to develop new aerial inspection techniques. And I just want to probe that a little bit and ask about what sort of aerial inspection techniques you have and what sort of techniques you develop in and if there's any kind of new technology coming into play that is helping you to kind of open up these new possibilities.
Yeah, I can see Sean chomping at the bit on this one because we've got a really exciting capability, which is very much an honour capability. but a really interesting R and D project underway. Looking a whole new payload for our helicopters. Today we capture almost the equivalent of Google street view for the railway. We go around using an intervalometer, ah, capturing photos every few seconds of the railway corridor in both directions, and we have tens of thousands of users across, the network rail and externally across a number of contractors. And we hear people all the time telling us about how amazing it is to be able to go onto that system, look at planning their access to do some works or what's the clearance for X or Y? They use it for so many different applications. Well that's just almost version one of what we want to achieve, version two is how do you get an even richer dataset into that platform and allow even more applications for it? And that's where I'll hand over to Sean to talk about, a really interesting R and D project we're doing at the moment.
Yeah, so some time ago I was sitting getting quite annoyed with the fact that we have a great motto that it says survey once, use many. it's a great mantra to have, but even back in previous iterations of my career within the railway, you would go out and somebody would survey the railway for a project and then two days later somebody else would go out and survey the railway for the same project, but for a different arm of the project. and of course again it's all land survey, you get people out on track. so we wanted to get away from that and technology has come on so much. So I was looking to see what was in the market. There is nothing in the market that we could really use for what we wanted, but there was lots of off the shelf bits and pieces we could put together. And we have put together a really awesome piece of kit called Max. It stands for multi angular camera system. It is 4150 megapixel cameras. So these are state of the art, full frame cameras. One of those cameras is also a near infrared camera, so we can look at vegetation health, we can look at all sorts of things by putting false colour in and start working on that side of it. they're set in such a way that as they capture the imagery, we can use it as a photographic overlay so we could start doing 3d modelling with it. But coupled with that as well is, the latest, laser system. So not only will we be capturing rgb photographic data, we'll be capturing, laser lidar scan data. We've done some pre testing of the system on the ground because we're waiting for permission to actually fly it. and we've done some calculations. We're looking at an average point density of about 600 points per square metre, which is unheard of. And we're hoping, and I will touch every wood that is here that we're going to be looking at, what's known as a ground sample distance of about ten millimetres per pixel, which is well into survey standard. but it's going to allow people to our teams and even our, ah, managers, people in control, it will allow them to better manage, the assets, because the data will be accurate. We can match what's out on the track in real world compared to what's there in the ellipse world where we've got all these assets that actually, are they all still there? So with some cleansing of data, we'll be able to match things, what's on the ground with what's in the system. We can then overlay those descriptions onto the, pictures as well, so you'll have a really good understanding, of what your infrastructure looks like. that's stage one of it. Stage two is we then look at, and God forbid if we ever have to use it, if there was a major incident, being able to get out there quickly, fly it, build the three dimensional model and then give that model to people to look through Oculus goggles, so they can actually walk around the site without being on site. So again, making those decisions, having informed decision making, rather than everybody piling up on site and, clogging up the recovery and things like that. So it's about and showing people like the department, because the Department for Transport, they'd like to know what's going on. Well, rather than take them to site, just put the goggles on and go, right, you can have a walk around. This is what's going on. So it is a very exciting, time. If it doesn't work, I'm available for consultancy work than anything else because I'm fairly sure, ah, somebody will have something to say, but everything is pointing towards it exceeding what I thought it could do. It is something I'm really excited about because it's giving our teams what they need, which is really good data, they get data off the trains. This is about merging all this data together. So.
Yeah, it's a really, the Lidar data in particular is a really interesting new capability. So we currently do one national survey, effectively every, every control period. So the last one I think was back in 2018, so quite a few years ago now. And that's used for all manner applications from like drainage, looking at drainage conditions, looking at kind of geotechnical elements, off track vegetation, things like that. So we're really interested to see, as we develop and mature the service, how we can use repeat flights and repeat sets of data to compare to one another. So we can look at things like encroachment of vegetation onto the track environment, onto the overhead lines, we can look at potentially changes to slope conditions. So if you can compare two datasets and maybe see movements that wouldn't have otherwise been noticed, there's all these different applications for this data. I think we're barely scratching the surface at this stage. But once we kind of begin to capture that test data and shout from the rooftops about it, I think there's going to be, it's going to get a lot of people internally very interested in new things we can do with it. So yeah, it's really exciting.
That's absolutely fascinating. Now, I'm slightly conscious of time as well. I just wanted to move on really just before we, just before we finish, to talk about the results of the surveys. I talked about the surveys themselves and obviously a, great length of technology involved, but just a little bit about the results of these surveys generate. And the first question I wanted to ask really on that subject was once you've done these surveys, once you've identified a fault and a necessary repair, kind of how long are we talking? What's the time scale of people kind of reviewing the information you've collected and coming up with solution and then actually getting out and solving it.
So from a thermal imaging point of view, we work in two distinct ways. If there's going to be a direct, threat to life, or damage to the infrastructure, immediately, we will ring straight through to the national operations centre and get an automatic line blockage. we can tell them where we are. now we haven't had to do that, luckily. In fact I've only ever had to renew control once because there was a tree down across the line, and I knew there was a train coming, but luckily the train was stopping. They we got it sorted. but for our run of the mill patrols, the control room for that area. So if we were in Scotland, they would get the information within 20 to 30 minutes of us landing, depending on how many faults we'd found. and then that goes straight into, the fork, system into frame and then that gets portioned out to the teams. So it's, you know, from us finding it to actually getting onto an engineer's radar, it can be half an hour from when we land with the max.
This is going to be the really interesting next phase. It's how we, we're, going to be capturing so much data, I think, in the region of two terabytes an hour, something, something like that. That's right, isn't it, Sean?
Yeah, it is indeed, yeah.
So then the next kind of question linked to that, developing capability is how do we just ingest and handle that quantity of data? there are some kind of parallels with the new measurement train and other kind of capabilities that rail has. and I think there's probably stuff we can learn from other teams like that. But, yeah, that's the next question. But, it's an interesting one and an exciting kind of challenge, I think, to get around, and I'm sure with things as they develop that we'll find solutions to it.
Fantastic. Just to just probe then the outcomes of the surveys, then just a little bit further. I just wondered if you could quantify then kind of how many delays or disruptions you reckon that you might prevent overall, with your surveys and your discoveries.
Anything proactive is quite difficult because you don't know what the outcome might have been. What I would say is, I think Scotland having its own helicopter or Scotland's railways having their own helicopter is predicated on schedule. Eight payments and delays. That's kind of the economics of that were factored in. and I know there was some analysis done similarly in other areas. Down in sovereign, for example, in the past, the same analysis has been run and effectively more than pays for itself. So it's very hard to quantify the exact number because it does vary. Shaun mentioned earlier, this year alone we've seen a 92% increase in call outs in response to storms. I don't know what the precise number is this year, Sean, but, each of those, even if you open the railway half an hour sooner than you would have otherwise, that adds up to quite a significant amount depending on which line you're looking at. So, yeah, it's very hard to quantify, maybe. Sean.
Ah, if you think about thermal imaging at Waterloo, here at Waterloo, we've seen what happens when Waterloo shuts due to, infrastructure failure. So, us finding one, finding that fault, and I know there is systems out there, there's AIVR on the front of trains, that looks at the track it's on and perhaps the couple next to them. But if you take from Waterloo through to Clapham, we can fly that in about ten minutes. But we cover every single line there is that thing, because it is a proactive, proactive fault that you've found and you've gone right, as Bradley has said, it is very hard to say, well, actually, how much would this have cost us if we shut the up main fast at Waterloo or Vauxhall? And you could only go back, and look at previous years when something like that has happened. And it's quite difficult for us because as Bradley alluded to earlier, everybody sees this as a very expensive resource. But actually if you take that little leap of faith and go, well, they found 30 faults last year. Out of those 30 faults, how many of them would have shut the railway? And how much would that have actually cost us? Actually that we're not that expensive. and people look at the helicopter and think, oh, it's a luxury but it's not. It's actually a really good tool for surveying massive amounts. You know, we can do the Bournemouth mainline, Waterloo to Bournemouth in probably four and a half hours. you know, but we're not just looking at one line, we're also looking at everything else around us because the beauty again, of thermal imaging is if it's hot, it may not be necessarily that that's wrong. You're also looking at the stuff that's cold because it could be the fact that something's cold and is overloading something else. So. And of course we act as a really good deterrent as well. With the same colour as a police helicopter, that's not for anything lotharious, it's just that a study was done and, you know, it's actually the most visible colour in the sky, so. But when people see us, you know, especially during school holidays, it puts a little doubt in their mind. So if they were going to nip over the fence, they don't.
So, yeah, I'd also say we find fault pretty much every day, so, particularly this time of year, we're, flying quite a capable thermal imaging system that has an array of different cameras. we're flying that every day. It's effectively a military grade camera, we find on ole overhead line equipment, we find fault practically every day with that. so things that are overheating or sometimes you'll be doing an ole inspection, you might find other stuff as well that you report in. So it really differs. But yeah, we're finding stuff regularly. It's just very hard to quantify what that one particular fault you found, what that might have equated to. But yeah, we definitely have a big impact. What we like to think we do.
Fantastic. Now I just have one final question, really. And it's a little bit of childish curiosity, to be honest. Now, I was doing, a bit of reading kind of before we met up today to have the discussion. And I found in 2014 there was a huge fault identified on the east coast mainline. Could have brought down the wires on all four rails. The air ops team spotted it. Ah, the line was closed. That was fixed. And it got me thinking really, just like I said, just completely out of curiosity, what the single biggest incident is you think that you've identified and that you've been able to solve.
My colleague found, a very interesting one, again, just by he was thermal imaging the overhead wires and he actually saw a freightliner train, and one of the, wagons. All the wheels were red hot so that their brakes had actually. They'd left the handbrake on on that train. And you don't know how far. You know, we couldn't work out how far that train had actually come. but that's a potential derailment. gone. I found, the line completely washed away on the malaise line. Not the malaise line, sorry, the Kyle line, up. And I can tell you the exact mileage. It was the seven mile post because I found the seven mile post as well that was washed down the bank. but it was quite interesting because we went there on the Saturday and the line was completely washed away. We fed it straight back to the team and said, look, the line has to stay blocked. Your track has gone missing. And then, we went back there the next day and there wasn't 1oz of water to be seen anywhere. Unfortunately, we were heavily involved in the carbon incident where unfortunately, people, tragically lost their lives. But that day we flew the whole of Scotland, and made sure that it couldn't happen anywhere else. And it was a very solemn day for myself and the pilot because, you know, we were quite laughing and jokey. But the cold reality of, you know, in my, era, I've seen many incidents. The first time he's ever seen a major incident. so it was quite sobering for him. But at the end of the day, we actually got to the, track at Polemont. And that was the second biggest, thing they were. The fourth applied canal had burst its banks and the main line had become the canal and washed everything away and it was flowing down there and, it was the little smile in our face as we watched this poor man from the canals and rivers truss throwing sandbags, trying to stop this flood of water and the sandbags just being washed away. And we had that little chuckle inside and had a bit of a laugh going, mate, give it up. You're not going anywhere. And again, we fed everything through and all that, all that. The control knew at the time there'd been a tripping, and that was it. But actually the track was under probably 6ft of water. There's many memorable, faults. It gives you a sense of pride. You found something, an achievement that we never want to see anything like, the carmont incident ever again. And I think it gave us that sense. Every time we find something, it's a big tick in the box for us.
Thank you very much. That brings us to the end then, I think, of this latest edition of the real technology magazine podcast. This is one a discussion that I've been looking forward to for so many weeks, honestly, since we got it in the diary, delivered on every account, really. I've absolutely loved listening to you two guys this afternoon and I hope that everybody else listening, feel the same pleasure that I did. So, Shawn Leahy and Bradley Sparks, thank you very much for joining me on this episode of Rail Tilt Energy magazine podcast and I hope you'll join us again next time. You've been listening to the latest podcast from Rail Technology magazine. Don't forget to like and subscribe to. Make sure you receive every new edition.