Any railway is in constant motion. Not just the trains and the passengers, but the infrastructure too. The track moves in its ballast. Ballast moves on the trackbed. Even the ground moves – as it dries out in summer, gets soaked from frequent applications of British “weather”, and even suffers from frost heave. All this [...]

Written by Paul Curtis for the rail engineer The Railway Storage facility at Long Marston, south of Stratford upon Avon, was host to the recent MacroRail 2011 Exhibition. For the first time, some 60 Rail Alliance Members gathered together to display...

Friday 16th September will see the Rail Alliance throw open their doors to the rail industry free of charge to come and look at over 50 of their member companies demonstrating and exhibiting their products and services. The event will...

A former London Transport apprentice is the new president of the SOE. Garry Gilby became President of the Society of Operations Engineers (SOE) during the organisation’s AGM in July 2011. Succeeding Fleet Engineer Chris Grime, Garry delivered an inspiring speech describing...

In May 2010, surveying specialist Severn Partnership was approached to provide a proposal for track movement monitoring during piling works for a new footbridge adjacent to the railway fence line. This needed to adhere to Network Rail Standard NR/BS/LI/045...

Value for money and driving down costs are two linked themes that are very much the focus of attention at present. The Rail value for money study by Sir Roy McNulty is bringing into sharp focus how cost savings...

The Gotthard Base tunnel is the longest tunnel in the world and burrows through the Alps in Switzerland. Beneath the highest mountain peaks the tunnel courses some 2000 metres below the rock and lies only about 550 metres above sea...

Network Rail is not just the infrastructure controller. It manages more than 100 rail vehicles for roles as adverse as weather mitigation and incident response. Although part of this fleet was inherited from British Rail, in recent years the...

Something quite remarkable happened in Southampton Tunnel this Christmas, a rare event in the world of railway engineering: absolutely nothing. That is because over the previous festive period, the team delivering a challenging project to accommodate high-cube containers exploited...

“It may have taken the railway civil engineering industry by surprise, but…” At this point Andy Milner, Amey’s Managing Director - Consulting, pauses for a moment, “…it all turned out exactly as we had planned!” In 2009, his company was...