Public Funding for Oxford Plastic Systems Limited

The market opportunity and innovation in this project is for a novel means of routing and protecting cables in the ballast bed. Cables need to cross the rail lines as part of the signaling and power systems and the current cable crossing methods can be a weak link in the system causing signaling failures. Damaged cables cause network delays, do not enhance the customer experience and result in significant lost productivity for the UK workforce. Some current methods of protecting cables disrupt the tamping process which leads to maintenance delays and can result in less than optimum tamping as manual tamping sometimes must be used. Thermoplastic sleepers will be developed that will reduce the cost of installing, maintaining & managing the infrastructure at the same time as providing an engineered solution that is both recyclable, sustainable & reduces carbon emissions compared to concrete solutions. The sleepers will provide enhanced cable protection compared with orange tubes and will provide a simple, low cost solution for cable management. The sleeper will improve on the current state of the art by providing a lightweight, easy to handle, non conducting, cable carrying sleeper.

Cables need to cross rail lines at regular intervals as part of the signalling system & must be electrically isolating. There are major disadvantages with the current methods of cable crossings which cause significant disruption when they fail & are expensive to install. Futhermore, urban rail systems can generate unwanted noise and this is often due to the use of concrete or steel sleepers. This project will deliver a range of unique, reinforced thermoplastic sleepers to address the practical issues of cable management & emission of sound to the environment and will demonstrate their performance in field trials with London Underground and Moorland & City Railways. This project addresses aspects of cost, carbon, capacity & customer satisfaction for the rail infrastructure. The project is a partnership of MERL Ltd, Oxford Plastic Systems Ltd and Testsure Technology Ltd with the TSB.

Awaiting Public Summary