Leeds to house cutting-edge rail engineering facility

The IHSRSI is to be funded by £11 million from government, £40 million from Leeds University and its rail industry partners, and £13 million from the Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership Growth Deal. It forms the early phase of a plan involving local authorities and businesses to position Leeds as a UK centre for rail engineering.

The role of the Institute will be to measure how train, track, power systems and signals interact as a unified system. It will be sited in the Leeds City Region Enterprise Zone, which is near junction 45 of the M1 motorway.

According to Prof Peter Woodward, director of the IHSRSI, facilities at the Institute will include a vehicle testing rig, “the equivalent of a rolling road”, on which train carriages will be put through a simulation of their duty cycle on the rails which they will be using in service. “It’s able to model the changes in the track geometry and the track alignment that the train would see in the real world. While it's undergoing that duty cycle it will be powered, as it is in the real world, which means that the vehicle’s own traction motors will be operating on this rolling road.” These tests could be carried out on components, such as bogies, combinations of components, such as two bogies connected on a chassis, or on the whole carriage. Woodward explained that this will allow de-risking to be carried out at each stage of the development of a prototype carriage.