Novel integrated drainage assessment to improve rail safety and reduce operational costs

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Objectives:- Provide a framework of Whole Life Cost model that can be applied across therailway drainage network.- Develop a drainage system performance assessment regime so that NR canhave a thorough realisation of the impact of poor drainage.- Identify high risk / critical drainage assets within the system. This will providethe foundation of a more robust and economic maintenance scheme.- Analyse the residual asset life and deterioration patterns of existing assets inorder to assist maintaining aged drainage assets.- Build a decision support tool that can help NR prioritise drainage work basedon budgets and risks.Potential outcome:- Increase asset knowledge - gain in depth understanding of the drainagesystem's capacity and performance.- Budget planning - with a WLC model, the lifetime expenditure is taken intoconsideration, which will help with overall budget forecasting and allocation.- Decision support - WLC approach helps asset managers to makecomprehensive and robust strategic management decisions for NRs drainagesystem.- Reduce risk - studying the railway drainage system in detail will allow NR tounderstand its weakness and control, if not eliminate, the risks associatedwith drainage failure.- Improve service - maintaining the drainage system at a desired performancelevel will reduce disruption to train operators and increase the reliability ofthe railway network for passengers.- Improve reputation - relationship with neighbours would be improved ifthere were fewer ooding events, which can be achieved with a betterdesigned maintained drainage system.Novelty:- Although WLC is widely used in many sectors, it has not been applied to theUK railway network. This project will provide a whole life cost model tailoredto the UK railway drainage system, considering the uniqueness andcomplexity of costs associated with the railway business operation.- The scope of the WLC model is both strategic and tactical. On a strategiclevel, it can help asset manager with future budget planning on the wholedrainage system. On a tactical level, WLC can be applied to individual asset,providing Routes engineers with a renewal, maintenance and utilisationoption for each asset.- Unlike other piped system such as water distribution and wastewaterdisposal, the hydraulic performance of railway drainage can be fully realisedand assessed and linked to the WLC in this work. Compared to the complexinterlinks in other systems, railway drainage systems it is relatively simple asthey often only composed of two or three parallel pipelines alongside thetrack, and hence require less computational power to be analysed.