Grasping the nettle: Integrating the UK’s first digital railway
Summary
On 22 July 2008, the Crossrail Act received Royal Assent, and earlier that same year Apple released its first smartphone, the iPhone 2G. Digital infrastructure was now beginning to fundamentally change how we communicated and controlled our lives, and infrastructure projects were starting to consider how much of this new technology they should embrace to deliver smarter outcomes. This fortuitous timing provided Crossrail with the opportunity to consider doing what had never been done before: to implement the UK’s first fully ‘digital railway’.
Digital technology now offers railway infrastructure owners new ways to manage and control their assets. Railways are expensive to own and operate, and most of the running costs are dictated by layers of legacy technology and inefficient operating rules. Maximising digital technology for a new railway allows outdated working practices to be overhauled and significant savings to be achieved in the full-life operating costs of the network. Crossrail worked hard from the outset to maximise these savings.