Sheffield students scoop 2024 Railway Challenge

UK: A team of students from the University of Sheffield was the winner of the 13th Railway Challenge competition, organised by the Railway Division of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Aimed at engineering students and apprentices across the rail sector, the annual competition requires the teams to design, build and operate a miniature locomotive, which is then put through its paces at the 261 mm gauge Stapleford Miniature Railway near Melton Mowbray. This year’s contest attracted 13 entries from four countries, with nine locomotives participating in the final three days of practical testing on June 28-30.

The Railway Challenge at Sheffield team has competed consistently over the past decade, and has been well placed on several occasions with a series of impressively designed locomotives, but the university had never previously won. This year the RCAS team scored 1 724 points out of a possible 2 000, heading off the University of Derby and Alstom, the defending champions from Poland’s Poznań University of Technology, and past winners FH Aachen and Transport for London.

Challenges evolve

The competition requires each team and locomotive to tackle a range of challenges, which are amended from year to year to keep the event fresh.

Established categories include maintainability, this year measuring the time taken to remove and refit a motored wheelset, and ride quality, monitored over a given length of the line. The traction challenge assesses the time taken to accelerate up a gradient over a measured distance from a standing start, although the former noise challenge has been discontinued as most entrants have switched from internal combustion to battery traction.

An autostop challenge required the loco to stop automatically at a precise location without any intervention from the driver, which Sheffield achieved to 40 mm within a tolerance of 5 m. The energy recovery challenge requires a locomotive to stop using regenerative braking and then use only that recovered energy to move as far as possible. The competition also a reliability element, whereby teams are penalised for any delays and breakdowns — notably both Sheffield and Derby completed the event without dropping a single point.

Optional challenges

For 2024, the organisers introduced a range of optional challenges to encourage further innovation. Teams were invited to enter any or all of the four on offer, but only their best score in any one of the optional challenges would be included in the overall result.

• Autocoupler — to design, implement and demonstrate an automatic coupler that would interface with one of the SMR coaches. Three teams demonstrated practical couplers and two more contributed design ideas.
• Aerodynamic — although the railway is limited to a maximum speed of 15 km/h, teams were invited to simulate their loco running at a much higher speed to demonstrate its aerodynamic performance. Three teams contributed high quality simulations and one built a model which was demonstrated in a wind tunnel.
• Location Announcement — teams had to design an audio-visual announcement or display system that would automatically announce key locations around the railway. Seven teams contributed design ideas and three teams demonstrated their system.
• Remote Data Recording and Monitoring — teams were required to transmit data about the performance of their locomotives to a central location. This proved particularly challenging, as the 4G coverage on the Stapleford estate turned out to be very patchy. Six teams submitted ideas but only two were able to demonstrate practical systems. According to IMechE, the teams took away various ideas to improve performance next year.

Entry Level competition

Another innovation this year was an Entry Level award to encourage aspiring teams to enter the paper-based aspects of the competition. This would enable them to become familiar with the event, in the hope that they would ready to build and enter a working locomotive in a future contest.

Entry level teams competed in the Design, Innovation and Business Case categories, submitting a design review report, a ‘learned society’ paper describing an innovative aspect of their proposal, and a business case for a fictional leasing company to procure a series build of 50 locomotives. They also participated in the Technical Poster and Visual Appearance challenges, explaining to visitors how their locomotive worked.

A specific challenge for the entry level teams was a Computer Aided Design category, requiring them to demonstrate by analysis why a key feature of their locomotive design would be fit for purpose.

The entry level competition attracted three new entrants. Of these, the team from Siemens Mobility’s signalling division in Chippenham won by a small margin over the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University. According to IMechE insiders, a group from Stadler has also expressed interest in participating in future events.

Commenting on the results, Head Judge Bill Reeve from Transport Scotland said the 13^th annual competition had seen ‘the most impressive set of entries ever’, although the final results were not quite as close as in 2023. He noted that this year was the first occasion when all of the locomotives participating in the weekend had been able to compete in the dynamic trials, even if not all had done so successfully.

On behalf of the judging team, he commended the participants for their teamwork and general good humour, noting that some had been particularly generous in sharing tools and helping other competitors.