Integrate to Accelerate: How AtkinsRéalis is bringing industry together to deliver new levels of collaboration and innovation

Markets

Transportation

Mark Fielding Smith

National Services Client Director, UK contact form

Like all public services, rail is being challenged to operate more efficiently and to enable our society to become more productive in support of a growing economy. Yet the rail industry is unusually fragmented, and its divisions can impede the collaborative, whole system approaches that are essential to embracing the latest technologies that deliver a better railway for all.

That’s why AtkinsRéalis is placing industry integration at the core of planning and delivering major programmes. Our unique holistic approach addresses the greatest challenges in delivering long-lasting benefits for our railway and the people who use it – delivering not only the new technology across multiple stakeholders in lockstep, while also enabling the broader transformational change required.

For the UK rail industry, this is a time of unprecedented challenge. To meet our obligations – to the public, to our stakeholders, and to future generations – we must deliver a more reliable, higher-performing railway that supports our economic growth and helps our communities thrive. We need to effect this change at pace, while reducing the costs of deployment, operations and maintenance.

Railway operators and infrastructure managers recognise this challenge and are keen to find effective ways to work together. Each has its own pipeline of incremental improvements for their portion of the railway, with an established formal process for consulting each other along the way. Sometimes challenges are overcome together through collaboration, but this generally only happens in dual partnerships or small groups.

However, the scale and pace of the changes required in complex cross industry programmes, demands whole railway transformation – and that cannot happen efficiently without broad, effective and deep collaboration. The reason is that our rail industry is heavily fragmented – with the railway operated by many organisations each with differing incentives, priorities and cultures. The consequences of this fragmentation are vast. From a high-level perspective, fragmentation means a complex environment, where organisations rarely understand each other’s needs fully, and often bring a sense of mistrust from previous endeavours that have gone wrong, or where day-to-day competition gets in the way of realising the opportunities to collaborate for more significant and sustainable gains.

On a more granular level, there is a risk that organisations across our industry suffer from tunnel vision. They rarely see the same data; they’re motivated to deliver their individual contractual outputs rather than incentivised to deliver overall railway outcomes; and the resulting misalignment means that organisations struggle to envision the same goals, let alone work towards them. The result is that too often, the wider benefits that we’re seeking are dependent on the efficient coming together of organisations and people who are not geared for alignment – meaning that outcomes are too much at the mercy of fortune.

Yet our railway only performs at its best on any given day when all these organisations work together and in order to fully unlock its potential for the future, we need the ability to act as one team; to consider the complete railway system, to share perspectives and to innovate changes that lead to beneficial outcomes for all railway users. We need to plan and deliver in a coordinated way that plays to each other’s strengths.

That’s precisely why a partnership approach is so important, enabling industry to unite deep operational, technical and programme delivery expertise within a common collaborative framework. The richness of thought and capability diversity this creates, together with new ways of working that nurture collaboration across all organisations, set the foundations for an industry capable of delivering integrated, transformational change.

ECD-Pioneer

In early 2020, Network Rail appointed AtkinsRéalis, leading a consortium with PwC and Ramboll, as Rail Systems Integration Partner (RSIP) with a mandate to bring industry together to develop and deliver the UK’s first application of digital signalling to a mainline mixed-use railway as part of the East Coast Digital Programme (ECDP). By embedding integration and collaboration from the start, the goal was to facilitate multi-organisational, holistic transformation of the East Coast railway enabled by digital signalling technology, while disseminating this new way of working across the industry, enabling industry to realise its potential in delivering national masterplan for digital signalling.

Golden thread alignment through the ECDP programme

Despite the arrival of a pandemic and successive lockdowns, RSIP successfully mobilised the ECDP vision of a pioneering cross-industry programme partnership, bringing together government, Network Rail, passenger, freight, charter and On Track Machine operators, Siemens (as Train Control Partner and Traffic Management Partner) and other technology providers. This unique cross-industry programme partnership is driven towards making the railway work better for people, providing a modern passenger experience, financial sustainability and bringing track and train closer together.

To achieve this, RSIP worked with over 30 different organisations to unite under a shared vision, replacing a traditional technology-led development approach that asks “what is the impact of infrastructure delivery on the operation of the railway?” with an industry change led approach that asks “what outcomes and benefits are most needed?”. Bringing organisations together with this people-centric, user-focused approach has enabled a whole system, whole lifecycle integration. This has fostered innovation in diverse cross-industry teams, creating the conditions for maximising the opportunities for improving our railway.

Walking the Talk

The foundations for these new ways of working were enshrined in an Industry Relationship Management Plan, signed up to by all programme partners at the earliest opportunity. As an industry-change programme with people at its core, it’s a fundamentally different approach to traditional major projects. By recognising that outcomes depend on how we enable and realise the changes across so many individual organisations, the integrated approach reduces risk while increasing opportunities for efficiency, inclusivity, and user-led innovation. This approach has been celebrated by the Institute for Collaborative Working, with the ECDP partnership receiving their Innovation Award in 2022.
ECDP is comprised of an ecosystem of supporting projects which together form the whole. The RSIP team propagated the ECDP’s vision through the individual projects, upon which the ECDP depends.

The magic of RSIP is in establishing collaboration across all stakeholders, with detailed scoping, technical, commercial and programme management expertise, leading to assurance, acceptance and benefits realisation management.

We introduced RSIP at the very outset of the journey and they have become a much-valued partner to us all in the ECDP. I was recently asked by colleagues from the Dutch Railways how we were managing to align the 27 duty holders who are part of ECDP, and my answer was that we have an RSIP in the programme who are the glue that bonds us together. They align and focus priorities, support us when things are getting tough and identify learning in order to quickly share good practice.

Paul Boyle

Head of ERTMS, LNER

RSIP led the industry collaboration in defining a first of kind cross industry business case to secure £2bn funding for the programme. The approach in setting these foundations as an industry resulted in an unprecedented Infrastructure and Projects Authority green assessment of the business case.

To further support the national masterplan for digital signalling and reduce the unit cost of deploying the European Train Control System (ETCS), AtkinsRéalis established and run the testing at the National ETCS Test Laboratory (NETL), the UK’s independent digital signalling equipment testing centre that assesses compliance against both European and British standards.

Simulator

In tandem, AtkinsRéalis supported the delivery of the dynamic ETCS test track at the Rail Innovation and Development Centre (RIDC) near Melton Mowbray and are delivering the Defect Recording Analysis and Corrective Action System (DRACAS), a digital solution for managing ETCS operational fault investigation and resolution.

In yet another world first, AtkinsRéalis have pioneered the design and delivery of a pathfinder project working closely with the Charter & Heritage sector and the technology provider Thales, exploring how traditional locomotives can be adapted to utilise digital signalling. The first vehicle Tornado, a new build steam locomotive owned by A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, has been fitted and is scheduled for dynamic testing.

I've been doing projects for 20 something years and I cannot remember within that whole period of time ever being in such a collaborative environment. The different ways of approaching issues and problems have been tremendous and I think that's actually why we've got so far so fast.

David Gordon

Principal Programme Sponsor, Trilink

Next stop, next level

Building on the successful partnership with ECDP, RSIP have been supporting development of the new Trilink programme on the West Coast Main Line (WCML), applying many of the same principles but in a multi-discipline infrastructure renewals context. The goal here is to maximise the value legacy for railway users from the once in a lifetime opportunity presented by this major investment, whilst bringing industry together to overcome the significant challenge of delivering a high volume of work efficiently.

Digital signalling is also planned to be rolled out by the Trilink programme, alongside Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU) proposals for the trans-pennine route, as part of the next phase of the national masterplan. Transferring and adapting the learnings and experience from ECDP is vital to achieving the most efficient industry migration to ETCS and the optimal operational end state.

RSIP have been on this journey for three years and understand how hard it is to help migrate people from constrained, legacy mindsets to truly collaborative togetherness in planning and delivery. The proven industry-leading collaboration processes we used as a basis for RSIP have informed international collaboration standards such as ISO44001, and AtkinsRéalis were one of the first organisations to be accredited to the standard.

For us, RSIP is far more than a role, it’s an ethos and a blueprint for a better railway. In Britain, many of the rail industry’s problems can be traced back to the sector’s fragmentation. It often increases risk, exacerbates complexity, hinders innovation, and obstructs user-centric changes. In the gaps between clients, partners and contractors, track and train, owners and operators, the vision is under constant threat of going down the wrong track and increasing cost.

ECDP is fitting trains and training people to enable a cascade of ETCS nationally, replacing fragmentation with integration - but this in turn depends on the collaborative framework, behaviours, processes and experience necessary for a successful rollout. As integrators, RSIPs role is to enable these at every step of the way.

Digital signalling is at a pioneering phase in Britain’s rail history.

Through the ECDP model being delivered by RSIP and its partners, our industry is demonstrating a ground-breaking commitment to enhancing not just the railway but the sector itself, and in so doing to replace linear and individualistic legacies with a dynamic, inclusive, and ambitious integration. The process is novel, but at its heart is the same passion: a more capable, reliable, safer and greener railway that does everyone proud.