The UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UKRPIF) has awarded the University of Birmingham, supported by Siemens Mobility, £15 million to establish a new railway research and innovation centre at Goole in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
This investment will enable the University of Birmingham to establish a new Centre of Excellence for Railway Through-Life Engineering in Goole alongside the existing Rail Accelerator for Innovation Solutions and Enterprise (RaisE) business centre and opposite Siemens Mobility’s new train factory, which is being established to build trains for London Underground’s Piccadilly line and is due to open in 2024.
The UKRPIF is also investing £15 million in a new Centre of Excellence for Railway Testing, Validation and Customer Experience in South Wales.
The Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education (BCRRE) is the lead institution for the UK Rail Research and Innovation Network (UKRRIN) and leads the UKRRIN Centre of Excellence in Digital Systems that works on the development and application of digital technologies for the railway. It will now also lead the Centre of Excellence in Railway Testing, Validation and Customer Experience in conjunction with the University of Huddersfield’s Institute of Railway Research (IRR), which hosts UKRRIN’s Centre of Excellence in Rolling Stock.
This new facility brings together the already established UKRRIN network and the SME community already based at RaisE with academic research and innovation alongside rail manufacturing. This next step continues the pathway to deliver the ‘rail village’ vision, benefitting the industry as a whole.
Professor Clive Roberts, BCRRE director, said: “We are delighted to continue and strengthen our relationship with Siemens Mobility both as one of the lead partners for the University of Birmingham and UKRRIN. With the new factory and centre of excellence underway we are determined to build, grow, and innovate the UK railway system.
“As a global leader in railway research and education, we work with partners across the world to develop their workforce and their technical and operational capabilities and it starts on our doorstep. We champion SMEs and work closely with supply chains to introduce new ideas, new ways of working and cross sector collaboration.
“With this new funding our aim is to have the capabilities and tools for through life engineering from conceptual design all the way to end of life with a focus on robotics, sensing and automation, coinciding with our Centre of Excellence in Digital systems.”
Sambit Banerjee, managing director of rolling stock and customer services at Siemens Mobility UK, added: “This is fantastic news, not just for Goole but the rail industry as a whole. Our vision was always much more than just building a train factory, we want to have a full rail village for the industry and to create a lasting skills legacy in Goole. Bringing academia, with the University of Birmingham and University of Huddersfield, and industry together in one site is exactly the kind of opportunity that will continue to foster collaboration and innovation across the UK rail industry as well as support the economy.”
Construction work on the Centre of Excellence for Railway Through-Life Engineering building is expected to begin later in 2023, with the facility set to open in 2025.
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