Articles by Olivier
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UK Rail - Top 4 topics to be dealt with right now.
UK Rail - Top 4 topics to be dealt with right now.
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Welcome to Paddington World
Welcome to Paddington World
We are in early July 2020, lock-down has been eased sufficiently so that even people who can work from home adventure…
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Olivier Andre shared this"The danger is, if we don't get enough of the culture change that I feel the railway still needs, I will be nervous about rail damaging the Bee Network brand. That's something we can't let happen." Andy Burnham said that to RAIL Magazine last week. It is a revealing warning. Eight railway lines are due to join the Bee Network by the end of 2028. The first routes integrate later this year. Bus and tram are already part of a single Greater Manchester proposition. Rail is next. So yes, rail culture will need to change. It will need to align with a brand built around reliability, integration and local accountability. But culture change is not enough on its own. Earlier this year I wrote about Switzerland, where coordination is not treated as a special initiative. It is how the railway operates. Timetables, connections, disruption response and customer information are designed as one system from the start. Greater Manchester now has a rare opportunity to build that discipline into rail integration from the beginning, rather than bolt it on later. Burnham pointed to one example of what good looks like: Network Rail and Avanti working together around the BRIT Awards, running dedicated overnight services to London while navigating engineering work that closed the Piccadilly to Stockport line to most other traffic. That coordination happened. But it should not take a music awards ceremony to make the railway behave like one system. As the first Bee Network rail routes integrate, the question is not only whether rail culture changes. It is whether the coordination layer exists to make the right behaviour routine. Culture is what people do. Coordination is what the system makes easy. For those working on rail integration, where does that coordination layer need to be designed first? #BeeNetwork #GBR #RailReform #OneRailway
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Olivier Andre reposted thisOlivier Andre reposted this'Passengers want a boring railway.' Boring as in predictable, reliable, and free from unnecessary disruption. That is how our Partner, Olivier Andre, describes the role our platform PULSE can play in the rail industry. When incidents happen, delays often grow because information sits across siloed systems. PULSE helps orchestrate that complexity. The platform receives incident data, supports the decision-making process, and feeds the right information back into the relevant expert systems in a modular way. The result? A stronger foundation for reducing thousands of delay minutes, improving operational flow, and supporting one of the rail industry’s most important priorities: passenger satisfaction.
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Olivier Andre shared this"I feel that I've spent my whole Railway career looking out of one eye." An MD candidate said that to Alex Hynes during an interview for one of DFTO's new integrated Railway roles. The person had spent most of their career on one side of the track/train divide. Alex used it to open his Rail Forum TOCTalk keynote yesterday. The room went quiet, because everyone recognised the feeling. The earlier presentations had already laid the evidence. David Dempsey CEng MIET from West Midlands Railway told the room he was generating 60 terabytes of operational data per period from his fleet. A third of it is operational: CCTV, onboard recorders, performance telemetry. Then he asked: "how do we pull that together into one system that actually makes sense?" That question is sitting in a lot of engineering directors' in-trays right now. The data exists. The business cases are being built. But the answer isn't another system alongside the existing ones. It is a coordination layer that makes what already exists readable across the Railway. Alex put it plainly: thousands of different systems, control centres still introducing new tools that cannot talk to the ones next to them. The freedom within a framework model he outlined gives integrated leaders real autonomy. But whether that autonomy translates into better decisions depends on whether the data layer can support them. One railway. One field of view. How much of that operational data is actually being used to make decisions the day it is generated? #GBR #RailTransform #UKRail #SystemsOrchestration
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Olivier Andre shared this"The data produced by a train belongs to the leasing company." A senior engineering director told me that once, in the context of a rail contract. Not a technical limitation. A commercial decision. This is one of the quietest blockers in modern rail: operators being locked out of the data generated by the assets, systems, and passengers they manage every day. Modern rolling stock is packed with sensors, capable of streaming health and condition data back to manufacturers. Yet in some cases, operators lack their own live operational data products. Access is mediated through supplier relationships, maintenance regimes, or by literally sitting next to an engineer and asking, "What's the system showing?" Gate-line systems capture valuable event data with every barrier movement. But an operator trying to build a digital twin of a station may find that data sits with the gate supplier, available only through a commercial arrangement. Three layers of the supply chain: leasing contracts, OEM systems and station tech suppliers. The same operational outcome every time: the people running the railway still cannot always access the information they need to run it better. Here is what makes this harder to accept. In 2018, the Department for Transport, Network Rail, ORR and RDG jointly published the Joint Rail Data Action Plan. It named the problem directly. Action 9 committed each rail entity to review and, where necessary, renegotiate supplier contracts so data ownership was clearly reflected in those agreements. The deadline was April 2019. It is now 2026. GBR inherits not just the ambition for one railway, but seven years of unfinished business. It may have something its predecessors lacked: a single mandate and the commercial leverage to make data access a baseline condition of doing business with the railway. One railway will not be created by structure alone. If a system generates operational data on the railway, the railway must have the right to use it. Which data barrier should GBR break first? #GBR #RailReform #DataStrategy #OneRailway
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Olivier Andre shared thisGBRX has just published Artificial Intelligence in Rail: The Industry Action Plan. Read it carefully. The most important word in it is not artificial. It is orchestration. The executive summary states: “Orchestrated action is the organising principle of the plan.” That matters because this document is not a call for more AI experiments. It is a diagnosis of why so many of them fail to scale. Section 3.3 names the pattern directly: “pilot confetti”, followed by a growing “pilot graveyard”. Local data. Temporary workarounds. Narrow governance. Promising demonstrations that cannot survive contact with the real railway. The barriers listed are not model-performance barriers. They are fragmented data, distributed accountability, legacy integration, misaligned commercial structures and multi-party governance. The technology was never what was missing. The coordination infrastructure beneath it is. Build that first, and AI has something to work on. Skip it, and the industry gets another wave of impressive pilots that never become part of how the railway actually runs. This is not a critique of AI. It is a more precise description of where the work starts. Which part of that coordination infrastructure does your organisation need to solve before AI can deliver what this plan promises? #GBR #UKRail #RailTransformation #SystemsOrchestration
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Olivier Andre reposted thisOlivier Andre reposted thisYesterday evening I was delighted to attend the launch of GBRX ‘s AI in Rail : Industry Action Plan. Good as always to hear from Toufic Machnouk Peter, Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill about the potential of AI in rail. And fascinating to hear about the AI incubator accelerator and pathfinders from Sarah Schlobohm. Good to see some RF members involved too (check out the logos below) and good to chat to Richard George Steve White Shamit Weinberger Gaiger OBE Philip Sherratt and many more. Thanks to Charlotte Pearce-Rhodes for organising such a valuable opportunity for the industry to connect on this important issue.
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Olivier Andre shared this"The aggregation of marginal gains." Dave Brailsford built cycling dynasties on that idea. Not the individual 1% improvements. The system that compounds them. Everyone remembers the gains. Fewer people ask what holds them together. That question is what brought Netcompany and INEOS Cycling together. From today, PULSE runs the full team ecosystem: training loads, race logistics, nutrition, travel, real-time race intelligence. Every moving part through one operational picture. Geraint Thomas described it as "everyone aligned and working off the same hymn sheet, so riders can focus fully on racing while the team around them is connected and making the best possible decisions." That is the aggregation mechanism. Not a dashboard. Not a data lake. A coordination layer that captures the gains before they leak. I have made this argument about rail for years. The performance layer has genuinely improved. Faster boarding, better adhesion treatment, more accurate delay attribution. The gains are real. They leak at the coordination layer because each improvement lives in a different system, owned by a different team, visible to a different person at a different moment. Seven Tour de France wins. Three Giros. Two Vueltas. Built on the same principle that the most complex rail networks still haven't fully applied. What does your organisation optimise first: individual capability or collective coordination? #SystemsOrchestration #INEOS #RailTransport #Orchestration
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Olivier Andre shared this"It doesn't matter whose fault it is. It is all our problem. And that flows through all of our decision-making." Marie Daly, Chief Operating Officer at Transport for Wales, said this at the Transport Times | News & Analysis | Events UK Rail Summit yesterday. She was describing a familiar industry moment. New rolling stock arrived. A communication issue emerged between train and trackside systems. Work stopped. Infrastructure and operator could have fallen into blame. TfW refused that logic. The question was not whose problem it was. The question was how to fix it for the customer. That mindset matters. Transport for Wales has delivered 90% on-time performance in eleven of the last thirteen periods, while growing passenger numbers by three million in three years. At the same summit, Alex Hynes described the DFTO he is building into GBR: an organisation chart drawn upside down, track and train together at every level, focused on root cause rather than blame. It was striking because the culture he described already exists somewhere in Britain, just not inside the part of the railway that GBR will absorb. Transport for Wales, like ScotRail, Merseyrail and TfL, sits outside GBR's future structure. Its integration was built under Welsh Government accountability, not under the framework now being assembled in England. The most developed live example of the culture GBR wants was built by an organisation that is not joining it. Can that culture transfer across a governance boundary, or does the accountability model need to come with it? #GBR #RailReform #UKRail #SystemsOrchestration
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Olivier Andre shared thisSwitzerland keeps appearing in British transport policy. A Scottish "local railway" model inspired by Swiss regional governance. Derby's Ride app cited this week as a benchmark for joined-up ticketing. Now a "Mini-Switzerland" pilot for Hope Valley, backed by £6 million. Three Swiss inspirations in three months. Is Britain borrowing the brand or the operating logic? What makes Swiss rural transport work is not the payment layer. It is something less visible. In Switzerland, the demand-responsive feeder bus waits at the station for the arriving train. That is not a technology feature. It is a coordination rule. Someone decided those two services were part of one system, then specified what should happen when one runs late. Hope Valley will find out quickly whether it has that rule. When the 17:23 from Sheffield is eight minutes late, does the connecting on-demand service wait, reroute, or leave? That same question exists at every scale. One city-region authority I am working with is building exactly this capability across tram, bus and traffic signals, so that when disruption hits, the network has a plan B that coordinates rather than fragments. Mini-Switzerland is the right ambition. The real test is who owns the connection when it breaks. Who specifies the coordination layer in your network? #RailReform #MultimodalTransport #TransportIntegration #Orchestration
Olivier Andre commented on a post
11h
The window transparency point is interesting and more prevalent on the Cl22x, but for train WiFi specifically the Faraday cage is a red herring - roof-mounted antennas already bypass it entirely. The same logic extends to passenger mobile signal: a picocell in each carriage fed from an external antenna solves the in-carriage distribution problem without touching the windows at all. With the consolidation of MNOs, the number of different picocells will reduce.
Which means the real bottleneck has always been lineside coverage and who funds it (waiting to see if FRMCS will serve passenger services) - exactly your conclusion, but the window/glass discussion arguably distracts from that point.
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Olivier Andre liked thisOlivier Andre liked thisLast night, we were proud to officially open our new Glasgow office and Engineering Centre of Excellence — and to do so alongside customers, partners, colleagues, government representatives and friends. A special thank you to the First Minister, the Japanese Consul, Scottish Enterprise and everyone who has supported us on this journey. This moment is about much more than opening another office. It’s a statement of confidence in Scotland, in the UK and in the opportunity ahead as we build the energy system of the future. Across the UK, we are entering one of the most significant infrastructure transformations of our generation. Connecting more renewable power, modernising our networks, and strengthening energy security will all depend on one thing: the grid — and our collective ability to deliver at pace and scale. That’s exactly what this new Glasgow centre is designed to support. With an investment of more than £3 million and the creation of 90 highly specialised roles, it strengthens our engineering capability and our ability to partner with customers on some of the most ambitious energy programmes in Europe. At Hitachi Energy, we are proud to play a role in turning ambition into reality — bringing together technology, expertise and collaboration to deliver what matters. Thank you to the Scottish Government, our customers and partners, and our teams whose dedication made this possible. This is an important milestone — but in many ways, it’s just the beginning. https://lnkd.in/eZqqP_QR #HitachiEnergy #EnergyTransition #Glasgow #ProudToBeHitachiEnergy #Engineering #NetZero
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Olivier Andre reacted on thisOlivier Andre reacted on thisWhile the em dash is now fundamentally seen as the most obvious trademark of AI writing, as someone who's been liberally using them for my entire career, I was musing about the case for the em dash. Firstly, while LLMs have staked their claim on the em dash over the past couple of years, this is but a blip in the punctuation mark's history. They first appeared, in below-text form, as a sublinear hyphen in classical Greece in the second century BC. But it was in eighth-century Ireland, as Irish monks transcribed Latin texts by hand, that the hyphen came into its own by correcting word breaks that accidentally crept in. Probably better than throwing out the whole beautifully-illustrated page and starting again. The em-dash then moved into the line, rather than below it, with the advent of the printing press in the 15th century. So it's been around for a while. I blame my love of the em dash squarely on a teenage fixation on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, as an early-2000s goth. While she certainly perfected the use of the em dash and seemed to rarely use any other punctuation at all, her work is a great example of how to connect phrases or sentences which in speech would be linked. I'm increasingly of the view that we need to reclaim the em dash from the clutches of AI slop. For my part, I can promise that if you receive an email or LinkedIn message from me littered with em dashes, it's from me, not from ChatGPT. I'd love to know your thoughts! Do you discount content using em dashes as being AI-generated, or are you similarly aggrieved at the besmirching of this most useful of punctuation marks?
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Olivier Andre liked thisOlivier Andre liked thisBack in London revisiting past glories. Kings Cross took 5 years of my life negotiating change, but doesn't she still look good? The grey glazing bars were my suggestion but may have preempted today's grey plague, which ruins many an interwar semi. Built in 1852 and still being used for its original purpose, although when it opened there were only two platforms. These days the combined King's Cross St Pancras complex handles around 100 million passengers a year, compared to 79 million at Heathrow (which is 350 times larger in surface area). Always thought the canopy on the front colonnade was a shame, even if functionally completely necessary and a vast improvement on the green shed of yesteryear.
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Olivier Andre liked thisOlivier Andre liked thisSince 2014, millions of people have taken a GTR (Govia Thameslink Railway) train to where they need to go: commuters into London, families holidaying on the south coast or students reaching their classrooms.🚆 GTR is the UK’s largest and most complex rail network, with almost 1 million passenger journeys taking place every day, and one in five of all rail journeys in the UK made on a GTR train. We’ve strived to continuously improve the service we offer to our customers, from upgrading our trains to supporting vital community initiatives. Every colleague has played their part in delivering a great service to customers and we want to thank everyone at GTR for an incredible journey together. Our legacy with GTR is one of connection, resilience and service. Here’s just a few of the things we’ve achieved together.
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Olivier Andre reacted on thisOlivier Andre reacted on thisA picture, a thousand words etc. My civil service life, it’s a wrap. Those who’ve made it worthwhile, and there are many hundreds, you know who you are, inside and outside. Those who didn’t you might know too. Anyway, onwards.
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Olivier Andre reacted on thisOlivier Andre reacted on thisAfter five rewarding and hugely enjoyable years at Story Contracting helping them successfully diversify into new markets, I am now excited to join Amey as the Consulting Market Director for Defence. In this new role I will help Amey become a recognised strategic defence supplier.
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Olivier Andre liked thisGisteren, met 26 graden buiten, spraken we binnen over de echte hitte van enterprise leadership: opereren in complexiteit, keuzes maken onder druk en zorgen dat actie volgt op inzicht. De boodschap was helder: in een operationele wereld draait leiderschap niet alleen om inzicht, maar om het orkestreren van actie. Niet achter de feiten aanlopen, maar vooruitkijken, verbinden en sturen. Met PULSE helpen we organisaties precies dat te doen: van signalen naar beslissingen en van beslissingen naar veilige, auditeerbare actie. Dank aan Olivier Andre Arie van der Oost Ulrik Vestergaard Knudsen Job van Schaik en alle deelnemers die erbij waren en bijdroegen aan het gesprek.
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Olivier Andre liked thisOlivier Andre liked this📅The next event in the Future of Rail series will focus on freight, taking place on 8 July in York. Freight services are a vital underpinning for the whole UK economy, but there is scope to grow rail freight significantly, with a Government target for 75% growth. What is needed to achieve this, and how will Great British Railways, devolved authorities and the private sector need to work together to deliver a world class freight service? This event, run in partnership with Network Rail and the Rail Freight Group, will feature an exhibition in addition to the conference agenda. Among the experienced industry leaders speaking is Paul Harwood, Head of Freight at Network Rail. 🔗Find out more and register your place here: https://lnkd.in/esY7YNxm #RailIndustry #UKRail #RIAFoR #FutureOfRail #Freight #RailFreight
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