Rift Project Clearances for UK Track Designers

The UK has notoriously tight infrastructure dating back to the steam railway. This means that even minor changes to the infrastructure, such as a track renewal or platform edge changes, requires assessment to ensure clearances remain safe. The UK network is home to over 100 different types of passenger and freight vehicles, which means that clearance assessment can often take significant time to calculate and can delay the design process.

In 2019 D/Gauge began development of clearance software specifically to support the UK track designer market, and the UK railway clearance managers at Network Rail. Our brief was to create clearance assessment software that could calculate in minutes (not hours or days), be accessible everywhere without specialist IT and be intuitive enough that it didn’t require formal training. We worked closely with several track experts and clearance managers to design all the key features needed to support the UK clearance market. Key features include:

·       Structure clearance assessment (using standard and non-standard vehicles)

·       Platform clearance assessments (using standard and non-standard vehicles)

·       Passing vehicle assessment (using standard and non-standard vehicles)

·       Passenger stepping assessment (using standard vehicles)

·       Track design Assessments

·       Infrastructure Change Assessments

·       Automated reporting for online viewing or downloading

Above image:- Summary of Structure Clearance Assessment at a Location

The software was accredited and approved by Network Rail for use on their network in May 2021. We invited the UK track industry to a software preview in June 2021 and over 300 potential UK customers showed interest. Our first commercial customer was WSP who helped us put the software through its paces and refine the functionality. We now provide the software to WSP, Jacobs, Babcock and Mott MacDonald and are in active negotiations with every major track design consultancy operating in the UK.