| The Engineering and Physical Sciences Council is pumping £7 million over the next six years into a new virtual centre for railway systems research, known as Rail Research UK. The centre will involve the work of 12 research groups and seven universities around the UK, and is being led by the universities of Birmingham and Southampton. The key aim of the centre is to help in creating a world class rail system for the UK. As Julia Drown MP stated during the formal launch of the centre at the House of Commons at the end of February, “People want to be sure we’ve got reliable, safe railways’. The new centre will bring together the fragmented railway research capabilities in the UK to create what Professor Keith Madelin, Director of the Rail Research Centre at the University of Birmingham, described as a one-stop-shop for information and support. ‘Rail Research UK will help to build a bigger, better and safer railway by providing a strong and coherent engineering science base,’ he said, emphasising the broad range of disciplines that will be included in the centre, from engineering to economics, and from the human factors in the system to overall transport policy As Rod Muttram, Chief Executive of Railway Safety, said, ‘Multidisciplinary work is essential in such a complex system’. He said he was confident that the centre would also attract a wide range of other collaborators from around the industry. Materials research will play an important part in the work of the centre. Three initial research themes of Engineering interfaces, Whole System Performance, and User, Community and Environment, have been selected, said Madelin, with materials work being concentrated in the first of those. Among the research being carried out is the monitoring of old and new track to understand track performance and degradation, which will hopefully include a collaboration with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, as well as predicting rail life by extending current research into rolling contact fatigue and crack propagation, and reviewing the cause of rail noise. Undoubtedly, materials will have important impacts in other areas of research too, such as passenger comfort and safety The UK’s rail network is badly in need of assistance. John Armitt, Chief Executive of Network Rail, admitted as much, saying, ‘A lot of our infrastructure if over 100 years old’. We have a huge renewal programme facing us. ‘Although £7 million is only a small amount of money compared to the sums spent on the railways each day, as Peter Hedges, Programme Manager for infrastructure and Environment at EPSRC, pointed out, it is a relatively large amount of funding in academic terms, and should provide a national focus for rail research while also increasing its profile and so generating extra funding for the centre. With most projects being collaborations with industry, the centre will also develop a user focused research programme that will be able to address both short-term and long-term problems within the system. |