Public Funding for Carpet Track Limited

Waybeam is an engineering technology in the rail sector and a business-focused attempt to change current thinking which applies heavy rail technology and standards to all non-light rail projects, regardless of suitability and cost. Waybeam is a more affordable track system intended for light to immediate rail (such as branch-lines) that is quicker, easier and cheaper to install and maintain. A constraint to the development of more mass transit projects is cost: it exists both upfront and during operations. Upfront costs arise from considerable ground-work (civils) to provide a suitable track bed and re-route utilities. The cost during operations arises from the difficulty of accessing rail which is fixed using mastic and from needing to access subsurface utilities that cross below rail lines. In urban (street-car) settings, there is the additional difficulty of trip hazards. There is a need to transport people for work and social reasons in a low carbon way. The need is given urgency by the requirement to 'level up', grow economies and improve the lives of deprived parts of the U.K. and by the rapid urbanisation in emerging economies worldwide. Meeting this need by private transport is antithetical to pathways to net zero but heavy rail applied to branch lines and electrified light rail are prohibitively expensive (innovation in rail has largely involved ever increasing costs per km e.g. see HS2; 'Hyper-loop') therefore a less expensive alternative is needed. Waybeam addresses this need with a design for 'intermediate' rail and non-electrified light rail. Although Waybeam's innovation borrows from previously-used concepts, its combination of these concepts and their application is novel to the rail sector and feasibility needs to be proved to gain acceptance and investment. The proposed design is more flexible than current near alternatives: it can be used as permanent or temporary way and on projects which have mixed branch-line and street-running in town centres. Assuming the prototype manufacture and testing are successful, the next step is to deploy demonstration track to secure orders and use manufacturing capabilities of specialist engineering companies in the U.K. Demonstrating the design in the U.K. is a pre-requisite to pursuing opportunities globally where it is known that there is also demand for cost-effective deployment of mass transit. The hoped-for result, therefore, is to create an export market for U.K. manufacturing.