Viper Innovations
Millions to Be Saved in CP7 with New Approach to Life Extension of Signalling Power Assets
This article first appeared in the Railway-News Magazine Issue 4 2023.
CP7 has been touted as the ‘make-do-and-mend’ control period. Prospective economic headwinds, the impact of inflation and the need to balance government books mean that Network Rail would have to deliver more with less.
Network Rail will have to find even more efficiencies in the delivery of work and seek novel and innovative ways to maintain safety, performance, efficiency and sustainability.
There have been discussions in the media about the potential to allow some assets to degrade over CP7 with the expectation of renewal in CP8. However, there has been resultant pushback from the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) and other railway stakeholders challenging this thinking. Nonetheless, life extension works (LEW) will be front-and-centre in ensuring the railway operates safely and in compliance. However, what’s the possibility of determining the life remaining in the asset to ensure minimum intervention and maximum asset availability and efficiency – all with minimal environmental impact?
It is essential to understand that very few railway assets have such an impact on performance as a failure of signalling power. In addition, the invasive and high-pressure environment of fault finding, maintenance, incident response and SPS can be a recipe for disaster. Safety issues, performance failure, missed KPIs and waste all result from being unable to predict and prevent failures and intervene before life expiry. Furthermore, renewals on SPS tend to be a blanket approach based on information gathered during a 5-yearly test, which can be affected by local climatic conditions at the time of the test and referenced against asset age. This leaves the asset manager with very little intelligence to determine the actual underlying condition of the asset and no real prospect of being able to deliver spot renewals.
