UK: The Global Centre of Rail Excellence launched a rail innovation competition in partnership with Innovate UK and the Department for Business & Trade at the InnoTrans trade show in Berlin.
The £500 000 competition asks teams to address thematic rail challenges including minimising degradation of ballast and wheels; improving passenger comfort and aerodynamics; improving the transport of hydrogen and loading of freight; and supporting network resilience and the decarbonisation of concrete.
Participants are asked to collaborate with an international partner on their projects.
‘We are beginning one of the most interesting and creative innovation competitions in rail today’, said GCRE Ltd CEO Simon Jones. ‘This competition — and particularly its international dimension — is an important one for GCRE as it shows once again the wide commercial appeal of the facility we are developing because of the unique infrastructure we will have here.’
Separately, at InnoTrans GCRE Ltd and Thales UK signed a memorandum of understanding for collaboration on digital security and skills. ‘Thales have a lot of experience, through their UK Cyber Resilience Lab in Ebbw Vale, in working with young people and helping to develop a new generation of digital skills in the wider community’, said Jones.
Spanish company Next Generation Rail Technologies has also agreed to use GCRE for product development and to demonstrate its real-time track and infrastructure monitoring systems that can identify problems including broken rails, wheel flats and rockslides.
AI start-up KONUX will work with GCRE to apply data science and machine learning to predictive maintenance, network usage and traffic monitoring for rail infrastructure management.
