The first in-person meeting for the UIC project Resilient Railways facing Climate Change: Heavy Rains (ReRa-Rain), was held on the 28th of June at UIC Headquarters in Paris, with 16 participants from IP, PKP, NR, RFI, SBB, SNCF, SYDNEY TRAINS, UIC, taking part and from ADIF who joined remotely.
The group took the opportunity for closer introductions and to further discuss the objectives of the project and how to organise it.
Special guest, Dr. Anam Sishma from Birmingham University also presented the results of the research on “Transport Infrastructure, Resilience and Adaptation”. The research was conducted by the UNECE WP.5/GE.3, (the Group of Experts on Assessment of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation for Inland Transport). The railway sector is represented in the group by Mercedes Gutierrez.
At the end, there was a general Q&A session, with the final act of the meeting being to establish the project’s next steps.
There are several projects being developed under the “ReRa” umbrella for UIC’s transversal Resilient Railways strategy. ReRa-Rain is the first of these projects to be launched. In 2023 other threats will be also analysed as part of the new ReRa-Winds, ReRa-Temp and ReRa-Adhesion projects.
For the coming 2022-2025 period, the ReRa-Rain’s goal is to investigate the resilience of our railway infrastructures, to ensure that extreme weather conditions and climate change are adapted to by (at minimum) carrying out the following actions:
- identifying and assessing the vulnerabilities we face, planning how to manage them and defining solutions for adaptation and resilience
- assessing the rail subsystems affected by heavy rain, analysing landslides, geotechnical problems and infrastructure issues, as well as potential damage to signalling and communications equipment
- studying and quantifying the operational delays and temporary closure of lines due to heavy rain
- producing scenarios to focus concrete action
- identifying use cases when railway infrastructure helps the environment to better face extreme weather conditions
