New Railway Environment - A Multidisciplinary concept

Professional development and training of the rail industry workforce is rapidly emerging as a crucial problem for the 21st century. Global concerns over the effect of the world's burgeoning fuel usage on climate change, the incessant drive towards efficient and effective transport systems, tightening budgets, and the demand for profitability have all impacted heavily on the structure and operation of rail organisations. Many long standing state based services have been broken into individually privatised companies often with very different commercially focused objectives compared to the service they replaced. Even the state based organisations that continue in existence have been subject to severe downsizing. A serious outcome of all these changes has been a consequent loss of individual and collective expertise from the industry. "Outsourcing" is frequently seen to be the way of the future, in which private consultants and firms provide most of the service, construction and maintenance needs of the rail systems. However, there is a shortage of the required knowledge and skills within the private sector in many countries, and there is a critical shortage of the capacity to provide professional development in the industry, which used to be undertaken in-house. The new providers of these services are in great need of specialised training and research support, in which enduring solutions must be formulated and implemented. Additionally, rail operations are becoming ever more knowledge intensive and dependent on technology transfer. It is therefore essential for future railway personnel to obtain a thorough knowledge of and insight into the whole rail transport system using an inter-disciplinary business concept. This book brings together material originally prepared for two postgraduate rail courses which were an initiative of Australian Railway Research Institute (ARRI) and Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The courses, and now this book, were created to fill a training need towards a broader vision of the rail industry including railway business, engineering, operations, access, management and safety. The specific purposes for which this book is presented to the rail industry include: • Enabling readers to gain a more thorough knowledge of the total rail transport system. • Promote interactions between the various disciplines in rail organisations. • Improve readers' understanding of the implications of their decision making on the rest of the organisation. • Help bring about more effective resource utilisation. • Encourage more efficient business operation. • Enhance the reader's ability to contribute positively to management of and innovation in railway operations. The original QUT/ARRI railway courses were widely acknowledged to be innovative and to have satisfied an important need. The editors hope the reader finds similar value in this book