Iarnród Éireann Irish Rail’s Post

Transcript

Winter is coming. My name is Mark Conroy. I'm the environmental and sustainability manager for the infrastructure side of the house. Hi, I'm Shivangi Singh. I am an environmental engineer working within the chief civil engineering Department. As we approach winter, leaves are falling and when it goes on to the track, due to the movement of the wheels on the track, it just creates a mulch which is like very gooey and it reduces the friction. That the wheel has with the track metal. The net effect of low rail adhesion or leaves on the track is the greasiness of the track. This mulch is to rail what ice is to Rd. We apply a product called sand ice via our multi-purpose vehicle to address the traction on the track. We do specialist water jetting. We have a network of automatic gel applicators onto the track and sanding systems installed directly onto the trains. All this to help reduce. The impact of this leaf fall, we're storm ready proactively. We're cutting back vegetation outside of the bird nesting season. We're making sure that the track geometry is aligned and correct. And also then in terms of reactive once the storm has passed, we have our maintenance crews out overnight making sure that the the track is cleared and also on the early trains to make sure that we can deal with any vegetation fall onto the line as it happens with increased frequencies of storm and their intensity. It is posing a significant risk to our vulnerable aged assets and infrastructure. We're already building in climate adaptation into our everyday business model. The East Coast railway infrastructure protection projects between Dublin and Wicklow is addressing the major hazards and risks that we have on the Russell Airline to coastal sea surges, coastal flooding, coastal erosion. So we want to ensure that in the longer term our railway. Remains robust for operations. So we're doing a variety of things and projects to reduce our own carbon footprint, including more electrification of the network, using renewable energy sources, switching to alternative fuels, we're reducing our waste consumption and switching to a circular economy concept and we're promoting more biodiversity initiatives. The end goal under our climate adaptation strategy is to make the railway more resilient. To ensure that the railway is protected in the longer term, we are constantly working to safeguard our railway for future generations and mitigate the climate change that is happening. But even with mitigations, we're trying to build an adaptation so that we have a safe, reliable and resilient rail.