How the Railway Industry Actually Works

Every railway in the world is a combination from the same parts. Here I explain what those parts are, what they do and why they might not always agree.

Your entire experience of the railway may be travelling to the station and getting on a train. It could be to your office or to a sports match. It might be travelling to see family and friends. The journey might be smooth and uneventful, or it might be blighted by delays and stress. Every day huge numbers of people use the railway networks across the world to travel while hundreds of thousands of tonnes of goods are also moved between destinations.

Behind the public view of the railway is an entire industry that makes it all happen. Across the world there are different ways railways are structured, with different names for departments that do the same thing. Some are publicly owned, some are wholly private, and others sit somewhere in between. I work in the UK rail sector, so the terms I use will be British ones. But all railways are made up of the same basic elements, because the assets that make up a railway, and the engineering behind them, do the same job wherever it is.

Infrastructure

Railways require infrastructure to allow trains to run. The extent and complexity of this infrastructure can vary hugely, from single-line railways with basic signalling up to multiple-track corridors with junctions, complex signalling systems, electrification and structures such as bridges, stations and tunnels. With the range of assets that make up the railway, the organisations and staff that manage the infrastructure are often organised into disciplines, aligned with specific asset types. These can include track, signalling and telecoms, electrification and structures. This is because each discipline’s assets require different training and skills to look after them.

This infrastructure, once built, has to be maintained, renewed and enhanced to ensure it continues to perform its function safely. Without work to look after it, the infrastructure would deteriorate under the traffic of trains, the weather and over time. This deterioration would first affect the railway’s performance before leading to safety issues. So teams of staff undertake inspection and maintenance activities, doing both preventative and corrective work alongside responding to service-affecting faults that are stopping or delaying trains. Undertaking this work requires several layers of management. It also needs more than people with tools, including engineering and asset management capability and large amounts of planning. Ultimately, the goal of all those who work within the maintenance organisation is to keep the infrastructure in a condition that allows trains to run safely and with a good level of performance.

But there will come a time when the infrastructure, either as a whole or individual assets, nears the end of its life and becomes challenging to maintain safely. This is when it will need enhanced maintenance, refurbishment or full renewal. These are opportunities to renew or upgrade assets as well as address underlying issues such as drainage or clearances. The delivery of these works could be undertaken by special teams in-house, within the infrastructure organisation, by the wider supply chain or by a mixture of both. In some cases, the overall infrastructure might no longer be fit for purpose or for the future demand forecasted. A renewal, replacing what’s there, isn’t enough. At this point an enhancement, to add capability, can be undertaken where the infrastructure in a specific area is redesigned to increase capacity or increase line speed. It could also require building something brand new.

Whether it is undertaking an inspection, performing maintenance or delivering a renewal, work to the infrastructure typically requires trains not to be running. This creates a tension. A railway’s function is to run trains. However, the infrastructure needs to be maintained and renewed to keep it safe to do so. This requires track access time, known as possessions. The amount of time required to undertake work ranges: minutes for inspections, hours for maintenance, days for renewals and sometimes years for enhancements. This access needs to be both planned and controlled to balance the needs of the railway overall and the work to look after the infrastructure.

The infrastructure organisation of any railway is responsible for the full lifecycle of the range of assets in its care, from first commissioning, through operational life, up to their eventual replacement. Without infrastructure, trains would have nothing on which to run. But just because you have both trains and infrastructure doesn’t mean you can immediately run a full service. That is where operations come in.

Network Operations

To allow multiple trains to run to multiple locations at any one time safely and on time requires a controlling, overseeing mind. The job of operations is to deliver the agreed train timetable, getting passengers to and from their destination at the expected time. On mixed-use railways, freight trains may use the same track, alongside passenger services. The operations organisation controls the movement of trains, at both a high-level and a more local level. At a local level, this is done by signallers, who work for the infrastructure owner and use the signalling system to set routes and permit trains to move.

The reliable operation of a railway requires the infrastructure to be in a condition to deliver the service, in a state of good repair and compliant with standards. When it is not, issues arise and operations have to react. Infrastructure faults or failures may prevent trains from moving over a section of track or require the implementation of temporary speed restrictions, both of which impact the timetable. Signallers and other operations staff then need to manage the movement of trains, providing a level of train service, whilst also giving maintenance teams access to resolve the issue. This can be a tough balance to strike. In some cases immediate access, and stopping trains to achieve it, is the right thing. Other times, resisting access to the infrastructure and running even a very degraded train service is best. Operations’ primary role is to run trains. This, at times, can put them in conflict with the infrastructure team, who require access to maintain their assets.

The need to run trains and work on the infrastructure is why the planned possessions, normally outside the train running window such as overnight, are so important. These possession times are planned for, with the timetable published around them. This means everyone, including the passengers, knows what to expect. Short-notice access requests upset the balance that railways plan hard to achieve, causing last-minute changes to timetables.

Having the infrastructure and the operations teams in place is like having the road and the traffic lights but with no cars.

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Rolling Stock

Ask someone who doesn’t work in the industry what they picture when they think of a railway and I would put good money on them saying trains. Trains, or rolling stock as they are known within the industry, are what give a railway its purpose. They are the things that move people or freight between destinations.

Rolling stock comes in two distinct types: passenger and freight. Their design is driven by what they move. The purpose of passenger trains is to carry people, but even within that there is some variation. Long-distance passenger trains are designed for speed and passenger comfort. Trains running shorter journeys, however, are more geared towards carrying as many people as possible with more room for standing passengers and wider doors. Freight trains, on the other hand, are designed to pull heavy loads, with focus on maximum traction needed to do so. The loads freight trains haul vary, depending on customer needs. They can range from aggregates and other bulk materials to cars or containers.

Similar to infrastructure, rolling stock needs to be maintained and there are limited windows to do it in. When trains are not in service, they are not making money. Railways don’t want lots of trains sitting doing nothing, so will have a fleet sized to their operational needs. This can make things tight, as there are often just enough trains to meet the needs of the timetable. Therefore they need to be maintained to ensure they are safe but also have high levels of availability. Where infrastructure teams fight for access, train fleet maintenance also battles for access to the trains that are needed to run the service. The maintenance and storage of trains is done in depots, where there are the facilities for cleaning, maintenance and stabling.

Trains are expensive to buy, so it is not uncommon for the actual operator to lease trains rather than own them outright. The companies that own the trains are called rolling stock companies or ROSCOs in the UK. By owning, but not operating, them those leasing the trains to others take none of the risk associated with a badly run service. The trains that are bought, or leased, have to fit the infrastructure they are going to run on. This includes the gauge, the type of electrification and the platforms at the stations they might call at. The buying of new trains is a major undertaking for a railway, often catching political attention.

Trains don’t move by themselves just because a signaller gives them a green signal. They need someone to operate them.

Train Operations

Train and freight operating companies (TOCs and FOCs respectively) are the businesses that run the train service. How they are set up differs depending on the railway. They might be the public-facing brand of a national publicly owned railway, the holder of a contract or franchise to run trains on publicly owned infrastructure, or a private business running it’s own network. In all cases, this is the brand people tend to see and the one that can get the blame when things go wrong. After all, a passenger might not care why their train is late. A broken rail, signalling failure, train issue or lack of driver all still make them late getting to where they need to be.

The drivers and train crew are the staff, working for the TOC or FOC, who are needed to safely move trains. Drivers use their training and route knowledge to safely navigate the train through the network to its destination. They observe and react to the signals and track conditions. On-train staff deal with passengers, checking tickets, providing catering and updates on the service. In some cases, they assist with dispatching the train from stations, checking doors are closed and people are clear of the train before it moves off.

At the stations, there might be additional staff from the train operating company, selling tickets, staffing ticket barriers, helping passengers and dispatching trains from the platforms.

There is a marked difference in how passenger and freight services approach operations. Passenger services run to a published timetable, so people know when to get to the station, while freight is more governed by demand from its customers as well as available train paths between destinations. Running these two types of services on the same infrastructure, as is done on mixed-use networks like the UK, is a challenge that requires planning and coordination from network operations. When it works, it works well, but when disruption occurs the effects domino rapidly. With multiple parties involved in a railway (the infrastructure owner/maintainer, passenger train operators and freight operators), there may be a system in place to record and attribute the cause of delays, along with their impact. This can lead to penalties for those deemed to be the cause.

With different companies working together, or competing, on a single network, there is a need for someone to set the rules or be in charge. To hold a railway together and make sure it fundamentally works.

Holding It Together

Each of the above elements is required to make a railway network work. This could be an individual private network, or it could be a national network, as seen across Europe. Class I railroads in the USA are completely private and have a fully vertically integrated structure, with all the elements of the railway within the same company as separate departments. Contrast that with the UK, which has a specific infrastructure and network operations company, Network Rail, that is government owned. Trains and their operation were, until very recently, the private sector part of the railway. This created the boundary between the elements we have described, with contracts in place to manage how they work with each other. But this is changing as there is now a move to bring the whole passenger railway (apart from rolling stock ownership and open access operators) back into public control. However, no matter how a nation’s railways are structured there are a number of other entities that it is common to see.

The first, and often most prominent, is the government itself. Because railways are seen as national infrastructure that enables or supports other economic activity, governments take a keen interest. In some countries this extends to owning or significantly supporting the rail network, either directly or through arm’s-length bodies. This can include funding for day-to-day running and maintenance of the railway and also supporting major railway projects. The level of this funding determines a lot about how a railway is run and the level of service it provides.

Second is some form of regulator. Trains travel at high speed whilst carrying either people or cargo. Incidents can cause deaths, injuries and ecological harm. This risk is controlled through adherence to laws and standards. Railways are also expected to deliver their service in terms of punctuality, reliability and capacity, especially in places where they are publicly owned. Ensuring they comply with their obligations is the job of this regulatory body. In reality this may take the form of a series of bodies that publish industry standards, regulate both the compliance and the economics of the industry and investigate accidents and incidents. In the UK these bodies are the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB), the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) and the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB). Whilst governments and their funding can determine what a railway can do, regulators determine what railways must do.

Finally, and a big catch-all term, is the wider supply chain. The companies in the supply chain provide people, technology, equipment and services to the railway. This sector of the railway industry is often overlooked, but it is vital. At one end are the labour suppliers who provide additional resource to enable maintenance work on the infrastructure to take place. There is the plant supplier who provides the machines that undertake the work on renewals sites. At the other end are the international companies that provide proven railway technology, systems and components to railways across the world. That could be lengths of rail, signalling systems or trains. The supply chain covers every element of the railway. All these companies rely on railways for work and revenue, but railways also rely on them for their goods and services.

The railway industry is much larger and more diverse than just tracks, trains or signals. It contains a vast number of different engineering fields, operational roles and supporting functions. Each of the elements discussed in this article appears in every railway and has its own job. They can pull against each other for access, for time and for money. It can lead to tension and disagreement.

But one other thing the railway has is its own language. I have used a number of those terms, like rolling stock, in this article. It can be hard for someone new to the industry to understand what is being talked about. That is why you need my Railway Glossary of Terms.

Your go-to guide for the terms and acronyms for the railway industry. It’s free to download here: https://bit.ly/glossRailterms