The UIC Asset Management Working Group (AMWG) was established three years ago to develop and communicate methods and tools to support the consistent application of asset management principles for the benefit of railway infrastructure managers.
The first phase of this development was concerned with establishing a common understanding of the concept of asset management, together with practical steps to help railway infrastructure managers to develop their own approach and methods. Last year we published the document “Guidelines for the application of asset management in railway infrastructure organisations”, which was sent to all UIC Members.
The second phase of work has now been completed. In this we have used the asset management framework as a reference for assessing asset management processes and systems and for comparing the actual performance and costs of the railway infrastructures that we manage. The document “Line comparison study” is the result of this second phase.
This booklet was drawn up by the members of the Line Comparison project group, on behalf of the UIC Asset Management WG. The study was carried out solely for research purposes, in order to improve understanding of the differences and similarities between asset management approaches.
Nine European rail infrastructure managers carried out the study and analysed best practice elements by comparing the asset management characteristics of their organisations and selected lines. This has lead to ideas to help improve their asset management methods.
Participants presented their approaches and solutions, and a comparison of these led to interesting new insights, concerning, for example, inspection regimes, definitions of maintenance and renewal categories, “headache” assets, asset strategy changes and trends, corresponding changes in organisation structures and the integration of asset information.
Other fields of interest are tools and methods for planning and scheduling, budget allocation, cost management and maintenance logging.
It was concluded that the different national safety regulations gave rise to big differences in asset management practices. Participants also concluded that there was a need for greater differentiation of line type or category, both as regards budget allocation and setting inspection and maintenance regime limits.
The study was distributed to all UIC Members and is available online on the UIC website: http://www.uic.org/etf/publication/publication-detail.php?code_pub=528
