This website was created to introduce the various aspects considered in the MEng Thesis of Gareth Dennis and will continue to be updated as part of the project.
Photo credits: © 2013 Gareth Dennisunless otherwise stated
Since the Talyllyn Railway reopened in 1951 as a preserved line, over one hundred privately operated heritage railways have been opened. These lines range from short stretches of line of less than a mile long to regularly used lines connecting towns over twenty miles apart.
Such lines are operated by a workforce primarily consisting of volunteers, some of whom have had past experience working on the mainline network. There is a wide range of expertise and a huge, unconsolidated knowledge base with years of experience and methodology.
It is often the case, however, that these lines are short of resources such as time, money, materials and labour, the direct result being that it is usual for the infrastructure to be formed from obsolete, worn or cascaded resources. Combined with the desire by owners and enthusiasts to operate heritage lines using archaic track system components as a snapshot of the past, rail and supporting infrastructure may be severely beyond its design life.
In order to ensure that suitable responsibility is taken by engineers and managers with respect to the safety of rail infrastructure, there needs to be a unified source of information regarding the safe limits for use of worn rails relevant to railways running at the lower speeds and traffic densities of heritage lines and there needs to be a better understanding of the general working practices and intuition in use across the industry.
To read more about the current guidelines available for use on heritage lines, click here.
As part of this thesis project a survey of every standard gauge heritage railway line in Britain will be made. This will be conducted in the form of an interview (the majority of which will be conducted over the phone), with answers being recorded on a pre-designed datasheet. Though the interview will be conducted on an informal basis, questions will be focussed on gaining specific details of each railway's management and operations.
A copy of the survey sheet can be downloaded here:
This data will then be aggregated, quantified where useful and summarised to give an up-to-date and relevant overview of the entire heritage railway sector. The data when viewed alongside the literature review will then steer the project towards any appropriate computational or physical testing and will determine the nature of the changes made to current guidelines that will be developed at the conclusion of the project.
To find out about what will be investigated with respect to the nature of heritage railway infrastructure, click here.
To see how the survey intends to better understand the practices and methodologies used in assessing the values and safety implications of rail wear, click here.
