The competition also allows the graduate and student teams to innovate and implement engineering concepts into their designs which are yet to be used in a railway application.
In addition to the locomotive, participants must also produce a design report, innovation report and a business case for their locomotive.
In 2017, I attended the competition as team leader of the winning SNC-Lavalin Rail & Transit (SNC-Lavalin) team. My experience participating in the 2017 competition brought with it many benefits, most notably evidence of my engineering and project management capabilities, which I have since used to convince colleagues and clients to involve me in exciting rail projects.
In knowledge of this, I presented the opportunity to the Young Rail Professionals (YRP), a volunteering organisation that exists to promote the rail industry and to inspire and develop the next generation of railway talent, to sponsor the 2018 competition.
The committee agreed that it was a fantastic opportunity to support the development of young engineers and hence I returned to the 2018 competition weekend as a sponsor.
As a sponsor, I had the opportunity to interact with this year’s participating teams and discuss aspects of the teams’ designs, as well as spread awareness and understanding of the YRP.
New to this year’s competition was Ricardo Rail, a team of graduate rail consultants, which despite competing for the first time in the Railway Challenge, won two out of the nine individual challenges, as well as the overall competition.
Their success was largely due to their incredible performance in the energy storage challenge, where their locomotive managed to travel over 60 metres on regenerated energy, a record for the Challenge.
Ricardo Rail achieved this through the use of a super-capacitor, which stored the regenerated energy as their locomotive braked to a halt, before releasing it for the locomotive to travel 63.16 metres.
In addition, Ricardo Rail came joint first along with SNC-Lavalin and the Fachhochschule Aachen (FH Aachen) in the Reliability Challenge, where none of winners’ locomotives suffered a technical issue throughout the entire competition.
This Challenge win was significant for FH Aachen, who had to assemble their locomotive at the competition weekend having travelled from Germany, becoming the first non-UK based team to win a Challenge.
SNC-Lavalin also returned to the competition with a team of fresh faces and a revamped locomotive.
Their main change was a new bogie design, which allowed for an improved traction system to be implemented, which served them well in the traction challenge, where they came out the Challenge winners.
As part of this new bogie design, SNC-Lavalin utilised springs in both their primary and secondary suspension, which improved on their Ride Comfort Challenge score from 2017, meaning they retained the Challenge win.
SNC-Lavalin were also winners of the Innovation Challenge, who implemented a visual wheel condition monitoring system, which captures images of the wheel tread when the locomotive moves at a low speed.
These images are then processed using MATLAB to identify thermal cracks present on the wheel tread, where the whole system provides an effective, time-saving and low-cost solution for wheel condition monitoring.
To complete their competition haul, SNC-Lavalin were also winners of the Design Challenge for producing the best design report.
After a disappointing performance in the 2017 competition, Transport for London (TfL) came back stronger winning both the Business Case Challenge and the Noise Challenge.
Their success in the Noise Challenge was undoubtedly due to the fact that they swapped their diesel generator for battery-electric system, which emits very little, if any noise.
In the final challenge, the Maintainability Challenge, the University of Sheffield broke the Challenge record, set by themselves the previous year, with a time of 103.12s to remove and replace a driven wheelset.
The university were innovative in their implementation of a chain tensioner, which enabled them to quickly remove, refit and re-tension their drive-train, which is usually a time-consuming aspect for most teams.
To award the University of Sheffield their challenge-win certificate for such innovation was a great pleasure. I was impressed by the team’s attitude to keep improving on an already successful system.
To conclude, the 2018 Railway Challenge was exciting as ever, giving a new Grand Champion and yet more ingenuity from the participating teams.
All participants spoke of how much they had learned as a result of taking part in the competition and the spectators of how impressed they were by the engineering that was on display.
If the Railway Challenge is anything to go by, the future certainly looks bright for the UK rail industry.