Weather-induced single point of failure assessment methodology for railways

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The rail sector is of great and growing importance to the economic and social functioning of the UK. Passenger usage has increase by over 50% compared to 2002-2003, with the amount of freight carried growing at a similar rate (Office of Rail Regulation, 2015). In maintaining a reliable service, Network Rail (NR) faces the twin challenges of responding to the impacts of weather events on a day-to-day basis whilst planning and implementing long-term adaptation work. Of critical importance to informing targeted cost-effective actions at both timescales is a better understanding of what the DfT Brown Review (2014) termed 'single-points of failure': critical sections of the rail network which have large scale impacts for society and economy, as exemplified by the collapse of the Dawlish Sea Wall in February 2014. This project aims to produce a transformative data-driven approach to map the criticality to weather-induced natural hazards as a fundamental step in both improved extreme event management and climate change adaptation prioritisation. Key to this is an expert-led metric for network criticality which can be used to identify the most critical locations on the network. This will allow NR to determine where adaptation work will have optimal benefit, whilst also aiding the allocation of resources and operational decisions during extreme events, reducing disruption-related costs and improving service to customers. The project has the following objectives:1. Define the key determinants of criticality from Network Rail's perspective.2. Formulate a criticality metric based on the determinants identified in objective 1.3. Demonstrate the metric on a Network Rail route and identify network-critical sections of track.4. Elicit views on implications for adaptation actions and extreme event management.The results are designed to be applicable to the entirety of NR's network and would inform decisions made on the 20,000 miles of track and 2,500 stations that NR owns and operates. To be cost-effective, the utilisation of the metric will need to enable a reduction in network disruption of around 0.1-0.2%, achieved through smarter allocation of resources/adaptation actions to those areas where the consequences of weather-related incidents in terms of network disruption is greatest. We believe that by integrating the results of this project into the existing NR systems described above, the company will be able to target conservatively a reduction of 3-5% of weather-related disruption, which would yield annual savings of £1.5-£2.5 million. These direct savings to NR would be multiplied further by the full economic savings to UK PLC, contributing to improved national productivity, and would also have impact on non-monetised benefits to society through more resilient mobility. Keywords: extreme weather; climate change; rail transport; disruption; resilience; business continuity