Great maintenance programs work behind the scenes. No one has to think about a system when it’s working safely, it just works. It’s only when things fail that people look at maintenance—and look at it too late. Often, those who are responsible for maintenance don’t get enough credit for the great work they are doing when things are going well and get too much blame when things go wrong.
Showing all the benefits of prescriptive maintenance programs has always been a challenge. The tools just weren’t sophisticated enough to highlight what maintenance programs do for asset life extension, safety, and the bottom line—until now.
Track engineers and track maintenance managers know what needs to be done to keep their rail lines in top working order. The time, energy, and money they spend on keeping track in shape pays off in long-term cost savings, longer rail life, and passenger safety and comfort. They know this – but the challenge has been being able to quantify and communicate the real monetary benefit of each dollar spent to maintain each mile of track.
Boards and budget committees want to see tangible savings. They want to see how track grinding goes beyond safety, comfort, or performance. You need to show how you’ll spend less down the line in repair and replacement costs when you invest in maintenance now.
As we emerge from the pandemic, rail is getting more attention as commuters are coming back and service levels are returning to normal. All levels of government finally realize what we’ve always known—public transport, and rail especially—is an essential part of our world. The public perception of rail is changing, commuter rail is becoming more like regional rail, as networks move away from morning and evening rush hour schedules to schedules with more trains throughout the day. People need to see rail as a fast, efficient, and comfortable way to get into the city. But to do that, rail systems must operate at peak performance.
As budgets were slashed during the pandemic, rail maintenance moved to “just keeping the lights on”—do what’s needed to be done to keep everything operating safely, but there isn’t money to do more. After two years of making do, the focus is back on ensuring systems meet and exceed performance, safety, and State of Good Repair (SOGR) criteria. The customer-facing benefits are important, but equally important is extending rail life with regular care, preventing needless spending in the future, and being good stewards of funding.
As things return to normal, engineering teams are tasked with (re)building business cases for prescriptive rail maintenance programs to win back riders and exceed State of Good Repair criteria.
As new funding is available to invest in transit across the board, rail networks can make improvements and restart their prescriptive maintenance programs. The technical teams who have the knowledge to plan and execute rail maintenance, are asked to propose clear, defensible business cases to senior executives and boards with less technical acumen. But without the financial data required to present the business case in a clear way, they are forced to rely more on safety, passenger comfort, and SOGR standards.
When you don’t have real data and real science to show how every dollar spent maintaining the system are dollars back to the agency in the long term, it’s hard to show why the maintenance program can’t do more with less. Solid financial data makes maintenance programs less invisible. Reliable data lets engineering teams show the benefits when things are running smoothly, efficiently—and invisibly.
And that’s the challenge: putting dollars into maintenance programs with defensible data and modeling.
Engineering teams need tools to show the impact their preventive maintenance programs will have on the rails across the system, make sure they’re optimally executed, and highlight the importance of these projects—financially, asset life extension, and safety-wise.
Boards and rail agencies need to see how if one maintenance plan is followed versus another how rail life is affected. Rail life extension from maintenance activities like grinding, milling, and friction management are technical and complex. The rail life improvements take years to show their impact, and it’s very difficult to show up front how the critical work done now pays off in cost savings down the line. Transit rail systems are very different from railroad to railroad, agency to agency; there aren’t industry benchmarks for rail life engineers can anchor their recommendations to. That’s why we built scientifically and physics-based modeling tools within DigitalClone for Rail to show the life-extension impact of these rail maintenance changes. These models give engineers a clear and definitive way to show how an agency’s rail assets benefits when the right program is followed.
DigitalClone for Rail also ensures the right money is spent in the right places. If a rail agency only focuses on life extension and track maintenance, they may be investing in the wrong areas or over-investing in the asset. There is a balance between when to maintain and when to replace. Sometimes it’s better to replace a piece of rail than to continue to pay to maintain it. The big question is, how would you know? That’s why DigitalClone for Rail starts by putting an agency’s actual financial data front and center. The economics tools allow any agency to understand how much they are spending on their rail replacement and maintenance program and what are the root causes of the biggest cost drivers.
The life extension and economic data can then be brought together to create stronger business cases that quantifies the costs and cost avoidance of prescriptive rail maintenance programs. Armed with the right data, track and maintenance engineers can be confident in their recurring cyclical capital plans and know maintenance can go from behind-the-scenes to a shining success story at their agency.
Sentient Science and Trapeze are integrating DigitalClone for Rail into Trapeze EAM. Capital Planning and State of Good Repair module as part of a complete enterprise asset management solution. Teams now have a single solution to maintain and optimize all assets enterprise-wide.
If you’d like to learn more about DigitalClone for Rail or EAM contact us for more information.
You can learn more about this exciting collaboration in the official announcement.
For more information railway track maintenance tools, please get in touch with us!