Proactive Mitigation of Adverse Weather Conditions to Increase Passenger Confidence in Rail Resilience

At Lenz Labs, our mission is to make train delays a problem of the past. During autumn and winter seasons, railway stakeholders face the challenge of operating passenger and freight services under low adhesion conditions that occur when vegetation is crushed onto damp rails to create a smooth, slippery surface. With reduced traction, drivers approach bends at high speed and encounter dangerous braking scenarios as they lose control over the wheels, resulting in platform and junction overruns, or even derailment.

To mitigate, reduced speed limits are imposed on 10% of services resulting in £345m of economic damage per year across the UK and fines to Network Rail of over £300m due to poor service reliability. In essence, drivers and stakeholders are suffering from the "black ice of rail".

To combat this problem, Lenz proposes the novel Traction Hub - a solution that delivers safe and predictable braking whilst improving acceleration performance by retrofitting to the wheelset and increasing adhesion levels at the wheel-rail interface.

Mitigating slip has the added benefits of allowing vehicles to traverse greater inclines - currently limited to 3 percent above horizontal - with the product requiring no new infrastructure to install. Once installed, the product aims to deliver improvements to the key metrics of control period 6 in public performance measure, miles per technical incident and signals passed at danger.

The founding team at Lenz Labs originally built Hyperloop prototype vehicles during their time leading the University of Edinburgh's Hyperloop Team from 2016-2019 and pioneered the use of novel traction principles within their roles. The blue-sky concept of Hyperloop alerted us to how much the rail industry stands to gain from the application of these underlying principles.

This inspired us to apply the technology conceived in developing the transport systems of the future to solve problems facing today's rail network.

With this SBRI First of a Kind project, we will be trialling the Traction Hub product on national rail infrastructure to accelerate the route to market and demonstrate the technologies' capabilities to rail stakeholders.

**We are appealing to the UK rail industry leaders and anyone interested in viewing a demonstration of the technology, to get in touch, explore the offering and join the journey. Drop Hamish a line at [email protected] to find out more.**