Meeting New Pandemic Work Demands

Owner and infrastructure manager of most of Great Britain’s railway network, Network Rail is responsible for ensuring reliable and efficient commuter transport along 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts, and thousands of signals, crossings, and stations. Despite being designated as essential workers by the U.K. government during the COVID-19 pandemic, Network Rail’s Wales and Western (NR WW) region had to comply with lockdown restrictions, which required all staff to work from home. They needed to move from an office-based environment, where face-to-face meetings were the norm, to remote lockdown standards. As a result, they faced numerous coordination and collaboration challenges, which caused them to find creative ways to work virtually while keeping the network operating safely and reliably. To overcome these difficulties, they needed innovative thinking, agile digital transformation, and teamwork.

Visualization, Design Integration, and Virtualization

During the lockdown, Network Rail was working on several projects requiring the upgrading of railway wayfinding and signaling at Paddington and Exeter stations, respectively. These projects presented challenges that included limited information, survey and data collection issues, and complicated asset documentation, compounded by the pandemic restrictions that traditional work methods could not accommodate. They desired an integrated technology approach in an open connected data environment to enable web-based visualization, design integration, and virtualization to meet project deliverables amid COVID-19. However, when they tried various data sharing platforms to implement a digital approach, none of them provided enough control and integrity of the source data to meet their needs.