I recently spent an excellent evening in the company of Adrian Shooter CBE and other railway specialists at our Railway Lecture and Dinner.
The evening commenced with a presentation by Adrian during which he outlined some examples of innovations and whether they been a success or a failure. Some of the items I noted were as follows:
- Atmospheric Railway – Exeter to Plymouth line, history recorded this as a failure due to rats eating the leather seal on the traction pipe valve (the seal had tallow/beeswax on it to soften the leather)
- Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive which was a success
- George Westinghouse’s standard air braking and signalling systems were successful
- General motors locomotive used engineering that had originally been developed for the automotive industry – so an early example of horizontal innovation
- Locomotive designed for LMS railway which had a 2000hp diesel mechanical locomotive with four diesel 500hp engines all geared at different rates was unsuccessful
- Advanced Passenger Train (APT) although losing an axle at 100mph near Carnforth worked well as it managed to stay upright
- Intercity 125 trains – now 40 years old and more reliable now than when they were new.
Adrian also highlighted the bid for the Chiltern Railways franchise and his specification for the trains which had to akin to a Boeing 737 i.e. good value for money, able to go anywhere and comfortable. The solution was the British Rail MK3 carriages, 14 year old coaches which ran well. He then went onto to talk about how he grew Chiltern Railways as a business, some examples given were:
- Extending the infrastructure to cover more stations
- Extending the newly built Warwick Parkway Station to grow from 500 to 1500 car parking spaces to cope with the increased demand by passengers
- Redeveloping Moor Street station in Birmingham
- Solving issue of laptop use in carriages not design for commuters using laptops
- Taxi bus routes set up covering a prescribed route and offering a door to door service
- Paying fares by smartphone.
Adrian also mentioned the 228 district line underground DMUs which had been bought by his company VivaRail and their redevelopment. One slide that I was particularly impressed with towards the end of Adrian’s presentation covered the EU Passenger/Workforce fatality rates across the EU railways from 2009-2013 and it was reassuring to see that the UK was at the bottom of the chart with 0.7 fatalities.
The presentation can be viewed here if you were not able to make it along to the lecture on the evening:
Following Adrian’s talk, Martin Halligan from the Railway Young Professionals group made a presentation to Deji Balogun who was selected as the winner of the Best Posters Competition. Deji’s poster on ‘The Digital Railway’ was showcased during the pre-post event networking sessions.
The evening then rounded off with an optional networking drinks reception and dinner in the Maxwell Library.
Comment from Martyn Chymera, Chairman, Railway TPN:
“The annual lecture and dinner was a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Adrian Shooter gave an extremely interesting lecture, which gave some fantastic examples of innovation in rail and demonstrated what can be achieved with perseverance. The lecture inspired the audience resulting in some very interesting conversations over dinner.”
Blog by
Deborah-Claire McKenzie, IET Community Manager