Network Rail chooses Train Planning System TPS

Network Rail, who owns and operates Great Britain’s railway infrastructure, has extended the long-term partnership with HaCon to use their Train Planning System TPS for the coming five years. Network Rail plans and works within Control Periods – now, they have signed a new agreement with HaCon for TPS covering Control Period 5 (CP5) which runs from 2014 through 2019.

Network Rail can have up to 300 train planners using TPS, successfully planning over 21,000 train services per day across Great Britain. For this task, Network Rail has deployed HaCon’s innovative TPS Enterprise software running on the latest 64-bit operating systems. TPS Enterprise has been developed for large-scale infrastructure managers across Europe and has the benefit of being able to provide seamless integration of data and orchestration of access requests between the infrastructure manager and the passenger and freight operators who are adopting HaCon’s TPS Operator edition.

Great Britain has some 32,000 km of railway network. Each year, 1.3 billion passenger journeys are made on Britain’s railway and over 100 million tonnes of freight is transported across the country. Over the last ten years, passenger journeys have increased by 40% and there is 60% more freight carried by rail than there was a decade ago. With HaCon’s TPS solution, Network Rail’s train planners can create and adapt optimal train schedules across the complex railway infrastructure of Great Britain, constantly responding to the ever-increasing demands of passenger and freight needs across the country.

Network Rail’s relationship with HaCon has grown from strength to strength over the years, and the renewed agreement demonstrates Network Rail’s long-term commitment to using TPS to achieve the daily production of safe, reliable and responsive train schedule planning to support the needs of their passenger and freight customers. 

HaCon’s recently established UK office in Milton Keynes acts as a central hub where teams from Hannover and Network Rail can collaborate on new innovations to support Great Britain’s railway industry both now and in the future. David Faithful, Head of UK for HaCon said “Our collaborative partnership with Network Rail enables us to use our technology to support the realisation of tangible, sustainable benefits for train planning across the UK, and the integration of Network Rail’s TPS Enterprise and our latest TPS Operator solutions will drive out significant benefits for the UK rail industry as a whole across CP5 and beyond”.