Resilience in rail: How to migrate industry from reactive to proactive

Already, volatile weather is threatening the integrity of our railways. Unprecedented rainfall, intense heatwaves and extreme storms are causing upheaval. Rail systems were not designed for such conditions. Assets and operations become harder to assure. As climate change and the extreme weather associated with it intensifies, the challenge of resilience will only grow more and more urgent. The consequences for our sector could hardly be greater.

Yet the importance extends far beyond rail itself. Railways are crucial in connecting communities, efficiently and safely moving people and goods. Therefore, their vulnerability to extreme weather events could be particularly costly. Already, weather-related disruptions to railways have significant economic costs; in the UK, storms in 2014 led to a £1.2bn loss, exacerbating reliability issues, sapping value for money, and threatening the communities dependent on public transport. Unless we rapidly improve how we embed resilience in rail, these problems will only worsen.

In the face of such complex and pervasive challenges to resilience, our sector must transcend the short-term mindset which tends to prioritize immediate concerns over those of the future. Short-term thinking fosters a reactive mindset, where problems are dealt with after the fact. Politicians tend to prioritize immediate issues, leaving long-term challenges to accumulate. Constant change undermines long-term investment, deterring industry. Future-proofing—which demands significant capital expenditure and tends to depend upon the political cycle—is all too often treated as a luxury. 

In the U.S., disaster response laws, processes and funding mechanisms have historically favored a rapid ‘return to normal’ over embedding deeper resilience, which can take longer and costs more than straightforward, like-for-like replacement. Entities who want a more resilient recovery—supported by the public—often find themselves stymied by bureaucracy. But slowly that is changing. Federal agencies are beginning to modify many of the necessary policies, some now requiring more demonstrable climate resilience as a condition of recovery funds. 

We need to embed a resilience mindset—and that means proving its value across every metric on which our projects are scored. Ultimately, all outcomes depend on resilience. Resilience doesn’t just avert disasters; it ensures many other positive outcomes that enables businesses and communities to build into their work, from public health to transport and social cohesion. By showing how embedding resilience in rail projects supports these outcomes, we can secure investment, improve our impact, and realize our sector’s potential for creating a better future. 

From reactive to proactive 

Short-term thinking fosters a reactive mindset, where problems are dealt with after the fact. For example, in the U.S., those in charge of city and state have a disproportionate influence on asset management and resiliency investment. Decision-makers at all levels are often only able to focus on resilience challenges after disruptive incidents, when they must react rapidly. Amid the urgency, long-term resilience measures can be crowded out by the immediate need to return to ‘normal’. Unless we can shift this dynamic towards proactively anticipating and avoiding such disasters, we will continue to suffer their consequences. 

While resilience demands different approaches, one constant is that we must do more with data. Threats differ, maturity varies, but across the board we must make better use of the available information and use it to overcome the complexity of negotiating trade-offs depending on the country, climate and market. Markets like the U.S. have scope for new programs; in the UK, however, most programs are renewals of existing infrastructure, some of which dates back to the 1800s. Futureproofing legacy infrastructure presents a different challenge to designing it from scratch, as does delivering in a mature market as opposed to a nascent one. 

However, in both cases, building resilience requires data: to model various future scenarios, simulate the asset’s behavior in such conditions, and prove the business case for building resilience accordingly. Supported by data, decision makers are better equipped to negotiate trade-offs. In the U.S., regional risks (e.g., earthquakes in California) are difficult to balance against federal priorities. Data can help identify how to embed resilience against various threats, justifying investment and harmonizing competing priorities. More data helps, but the key is making more of the data we already have. When data sets are left separate, they are less able to support decision making. 

Moreover, we miss out on the deeper behavioral insights integrated datasets can reveal. Resilience depends on more than physical robustness in extreme conditions. It’s also about how people respond to such events. From economics to social equity and risk perception, scenario modelling must incorporate not only physical science and engineering data, but also human response. Building the case for resilience requires insight into how people might respond to emergencies. Better utilization of data can help us anticipate such behavior and shape it for everyone’s benefit.

Resilience starts in the mind

Resilience is not a single feature, process or outcome; it’s the integration of all three, in service of fundamental human and social needs. In the face of multiple threats and competing priorities, a resilience mindset is not just another deliverable, but a way of ensuring universal benefits. While the multifaceted nature of resilience is challenging, its benefits are correspondingly diverse. For example, embedding resilience reduces downtime and boosts reliability—a perennial ambition for rail globally. 

Embedding resilience lays the foundations for every social and economic outcome we care about. Proving this can help shift interventions from reactive and costly, to proactive and preventative. To avoid reactiveness, we must embed early-stage needs assessment identifying the impact of shutdowns and potential disasters. Our team is working with the American Public Transport Association (APTA) to share lessons learned from other industries and cultures. For example, when Superstorm Sandy forced New York City’s public transport system to shut down for 5 days, costs mounted to $1T. Proactively planning for such eventualities can prevent costly shutdowns and unnecessary suffering. 

To level up, the rail industry must unite. We can only build resilience by overcoming the silos and fragmentation that results from traditional ways of working. Coordination and integration of resilience measures requires different solutions and full coordination with different states, cities and agencies. Otherwise, negotiating trade-offs between different priorities is too challenging. Rail organizations must also learn from best practices around the world. Wherever innovation seems to present too much uncertainty and risk, we must look beyond our borders. Earthquake early warning systems are proven in Japan, but not used in the U.S. The UK’s strong safety regulations can stymie the adoption of new technology, but other countries can show how safety can be maintained with streamlined standards.

Resilience is deeper than any one metric, process or outcome. This complexity accounts for why it is often reduced to a single aspect such as physical robustness. Yet resilience enables the outcomes our industry seeks. Economic prosperity, social impact and sustainability are all safeguarded by resilience, and resilience itself means the ongoing robustness of these human factors even in extreme conditions. Understanding this can help the rail industry rally behind resilience, not as yet another deliverable, but the basis upon which all our deliverables depend. That, surely, is worth protecting. 

By Sergio Callen, Vice President – U.S. National Rail & Transit Sector Manager; Maria Honeycutt, National Director for All-Hazards Resilience, and Resilience Global Practice Leader; and Dan Rodgers UK Strategic Rail Market Director.