Tom Lee Director of Standards, RSSB
2022 has been a very successful year with all changes to standards delivered on time or early. There is great engagement from the user community, by responding to consultations and especially joining the interactive standards update webinars, which are now a regular feature on the first Monday following updates to the catalogue.
Highlights have included significant revision to standards for ac electrification and a new handbook for ERTMS operation, principally to support deployment on the East Coast Mainline. For the first time in decades, a new standards committee has been established, for data systems and telematics; the chair, Liz Davies, gives her first update in section 3.
This report summarises the key activities in 2022 and is divided into sections:
Section 2 showcases 5 representative new and revised standards published in 2022 explaining the objectives and benefits being delivered.
Section 3 provides a narrative from the chairs of the seven standards committees, discussing key areas of interest in the year, including international standardisation. The list of committees is in section 7.
Section 4 gives a summary of the continued delivery of Rail Standards Strategy following its approval in late 2020.
Section 5 demonstrates, through detailed figures and analysis, the effective stewardship of the standards catalogue, specifically how the requirements of the Railway Group Standards Code are being met.
Section 6 includes information about how standards and changes to them are communicated.
Section 7 lists the standards committees and their subgroups.
Section 8 provides information on how to get in touch to seek help and provide feedback.
The primary benefit of standards is mainly economic. Adopting standards helps organisations reduce risk, primarily safety risk and risk of technical and operational incompatibility. They also variously help demonstrate compliance with legislation, improve reliability and performance, support sustainability and provide better customer experience. These factors are taken into consideration when assessing the business benefit for standard change and are published with new and significantly revised standards; this includes a monetary assessment of the value.
Pessimistic views on the value of standards change means that the claims are credible, although probably at the lower end of the range of the true benefit. RSSB consults the wider railway not just on the content of the standard but also the value of the benefits, and standards committees include this in their decision making. The benefits are normally assessed over several years, at least five, as it can take a while for standards truly to have an impact.
The new and revised standards published in 2022 had a combined estimated benefit of nearly £70m measured over five years. The true value is probably much more than that. To illustrate, benefits claimed for the revision to the ac electrification standards were just over £27m, for five years, assuming 100 single track kilometres of electrification. If this is scaled to match the electrification required for Network Rail to meet the traction decarbonisations network strategy to 2050, the benefits from the revisions to the standards are in excess of £700m. Importantly, the benefits arising from revising the standards is significantly greater than the cost of producing the standards.
The standards update webinars continue to be very popular, enabling a wide range of people to directly access the standards authors and key industry stakeholders, to hear first hand how the standards have been produced and revised, with the opportunity to ask questions. We’ve also continued the occasional webinars on specific standards where there is a significant new or revised standard.
Relevant excerpts from the standards update webinars are now embedded in the standards catalogue. We also continue to provide high quality PowerPoint® briefing materials, available for download from our website.
National Technical Specification Notices (NTSN) are now familiar, having replaced the EU Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSI) in Great Britain after leaving the EU (TSIs continue to apply in Northern Ireland). Up to now, the NTSNs overwhelmingly reflect the content of TSIs.
In 2022, the EU Agency for Rail has been revising the TSIs with a focus on green freight and digital technology. On behalf of government and with the support of the industry through standards committees and mirror groups, RSSB has been monitoring these changes and considering whether they should similarly be applied to the NTSNs, applied in a modified form, or simply not applied at all. This has been a substantial effort and will continue into 2023 as the TSI changes are running behind schedule.
Technical notes are used to provide information to supplement one or more standards and to help RSSB members apply standards appropriately. They have been reintroduced in 2022 with a substantial note on non-yellow front ends for trains and a smaller, but still significant, note on manging rail vehicle corrosion. More notes are planned to be published in 2023.
Standards are a team effort. RSSB has a dedicated team of specialists delivering standards, and they are supported by colleagues across RSSB, especially from the System Safety & Health, Research & Development, Sustainable Development, and Communications & Engagement teams. Without this complementary resource it would not be possible to deliver the standards.
As usual, we are also indebted to colleagues and organisations from across the industry. In particular we had tremendous support from many collaborators for the revision to ac electrification standards. Because of the significant benefits realised by these revisions the schedule was accelerated by six months, so that the benefits could be realised sooner. This was an incredibly tough challenge for such a complex series of changes and was only possible due to the constructive support received.
In addition, we receive significant support in reaching standards users and explaining our work from other organisations, notably Rail Partners, RDG and RIA, for which we are most grateful.
Tom LeeDirector of Standards, RSSB
