Are there any short-term benefits of using RoCM during Covid-19?
“Yes, with resources (financial and workforce) being in short supply due to the current business circumstances associated with Covid, RoCM allows customers to determine the essential rail maintenance required to keep the Rolling Stock delivering a safe and reliable service.”
How will RoCM continue to shape rail maintenance post-Covid?
“With financial pressure on rail operators and maintainers, the ability to know your assets’ condition and only undertake maintenance on equipment when it is required has two key benefits. The operator will save money by not undertaking unnecessary maintenance because they know their assets’ condition. Therefore, they won’t be spending money on replacing equipment that is still fulfilling its intended function or undertaking costly overhauls of major pieces of equipment that still have many years of life left.
The other key benefit is that if the train’s condition is acceptable, you can increase the maintenance intervals between services, increasing Rolling Stock availability. Therefore, reducing the fleet’s size required to run a timetable (as trains are in maintenance less often).”
Are there any barriers that can make RoCM challenging to implement? If so, how are they overcome?
“In older train fleets, the ICDs (interface control documents) usually are not available for the older systems and equipment. The ICDs allow the train system signal to easily be read by the on-board diagnostic system. When ICDs are not available, Nomad Tech has experienced Embedded Systems Engineers who can reverse engineer the available signals coming from the equipment to allow usable signals to be read and utilised.”