High Speed 2 (HS2) bosses visited the nerve centres of Crossrail and Sizewell B as part of a painstaking process to design the heartbeat of the £100bn line, a key figure has revealed. HS2 Ltd senior manager for train service delivery Kathryn Montgomery has lifted the lid on the detailed delivery of the Washwood Heath control centre that will run it. The set-up of the West Midlands hub is critical as it will be responsible for the “vast majority of decision making” when trains are running on HS2, she told HS2’s How to Build a Railway podcast.
Trains travelling between London and Birmingham at speeds of up to 360km/h will be fitted with the European Train Control System and largely operate themselves under driver supervision. Montgomery and her team visited the Crossrail control centre in Essex as well as the Sizewell B data hub in Suffolk before putting together a plan for the HS2 operations room.
She suggested that much of the value from the Elizabeth line visit was in what not to do when it came to planning and constructing the infrastructure. “The one lesson from Crossrail is to involve end users very early,” said Montgomery. “That [Crossrail’s] control centre was designed without a train operating company on board and even without end-user representatives from the infrastructure manager involved in the design, the layout and the functional requirements.”
Meanwhile the nuclear power station visit left an impression in terms of attention to detail. “The thing we were most impressed about there was their approach to training,” said Montgomery. “They’ve got an identical control room set up in their training suite, right down to the pictures on the wall and the order of the files on the shelves. It could be five years before one of our traffic management controllers deals with a point of failure in real life, which of course makes doing it in practice, in training, even more important.”
Ergonomics experts, architects and end-user representatives came together to pour over the layout of the HS2 control centre with operators in mind. “Things like attention, distraction, fatigue, workload – both underload and overload – have a huge impact in a safety-critical environment,” said Montgomery. “We really need to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make that environment as pleasant as possible for that end workforce.