Welcome
I always look forward to a trip on an HST, but this one is a bit different. Birmingham International is not usually the place you’d find one, and the bright yellow machine emerging from the angry grey skies provokes some surprised looks among passengers on the platform.
This is Network Rail’s New Measurement Train, converted from a passenger HST in 2003. While it is the most celebrated train from NR’s Infrastructure Monitoring fleet, it is in fact just one part of the company’s armoury of 13 trains and 64 vehicles. All have the same purpose of collecting data to provide insight into the state of the infrastructure, helping to move from find and fix to a predict and prevent approach to maintenance.
Each is targeted at a specific niche – the NMT concentrates on high-speed main lines, working on a roughly four-weekly circuit of routes. Across 2,000 recording shifts a year, the infrastructure monitoring fleet accumulates some 750,000 miles of recorded data. The catalyst for the increased use of this technology was the Hatfield derailment in 2000, found to be the result of gauge corner cracking. In no small part due to the infrastructure monitoring fleet, the number of broken rails each year on the…
