Infrastructure Monitoring – Overhead Line Equipment on In-Service Vehicles (Dynamic OLE Data)

Descriptions

Service Scope

Network Rail (NR) plans to issue a tender notice this year for acquiring services related to Monitoring of the OLE in Great Britain. The procurement scope includes designing, building, operating, and maintaining specialised sensor technologies for capturing, processing, storing, and transmitting output data. Separate from the core fleet requirements, OLE monitoring has been identified as an area where it is most effective to gather data from in-service passenger trains, with successful trials having been undertaken. The primary benefit of this approach is the frequency of data collection, which can provide alerts for emerging defects, allowing a quick response to prevent dewirements and the associated significant train service disruption.

New Technology and Innovation

Network Rail is agnostic to the method of data collection, and is keen to promote new technology and innovation. For this dynamic OLE project, the solutions provided to meets the requirements must be a demonstrably proven solution.

Scope and Specification Documents

Technical Requirements Specification are available in Network Rail's Bravo Platform to help the market prepare for the upcoming Tender. Please be aware that these documents are still in draft form and may undergo revisions before Network Rail issues them following the publication of the Tender Notice.

Please note that the requirement will be fulfilled through a single contract award per lot. We are currently finalising the lotting strategy, and while each lot will be awarded to a single lead supplier, this does not mean that all delivery must be carried out by one organisation alone. Suppliers are encouraged to propose integrated delivery models that may include multiple technologies or partners, provided these are managed under a single contractual arrangement per lot.

The documents shall be released through Network Rail's Bravo platform, details on how to access this are on page 7.

The routes under consideration for OLE In-service monitoring are:

Scotrail routes served by class 380s, class 385s and class 334 (class 334 forward-facing visual analytics only)

Suburban and Regional West Midlands electrified routes served by class 730s

OLE fitted London Overground Routes

NorthernRail routes served by class 331 & class 323

GTR routes served by class 700, class 717 & class 379

EMR routes that will be served by class 810s

Crewe to Liverpool

Norwich to Ipswich

The following routes are out of scope and will not be tendered for in CP7:

All Wales and Western routes

West Coast Main Line

East Coast Main Line

All lines currently served by West Midlands Trains Class 350

All lines currently served by Greater Anglia Class 720

All lines currently served by C2C Class 357

All lines currently served by East Midlands Trains Class 360