Scottish technology company Machines With Vision has secured a multi-million, multi-year contract with Network Rail following a two-year pilot of its technology for locating rail defects.
The company is targeting international growth with a system designed to help maintenance crews find faults more quickly, reducing repeat visits and the time workers spend searching in potentially hazardous trackside environments.
Its technology uses cameras mounted beneath inspection trains to build an image-based geospatial map of the railway. Machines With Vision says its RailLoc system and Fault Navigator mobile app can then guide crews to faults with millimetre accuracy.
Mark Chestney, infrastructure monitoring programme manager at Network Rail, said: “For every suspect, it would previously take on average an hour once you got on site to find it, now we’re talking five minutes. We have thousands of suspects every year, so that’s thousands of hours saved and thousands of hours of reduced exposure to slips, trips, and falls.”
He added: “With emergency speed restrictions costing thousands of pounds a minute in certain locations, deploying people to fix things rather than find things is a much more efficient way of working.”
Machines With Vision puts the global rail maintenance market at US$78 billion and estimates that imprecise defect location costs the industry US$6 billion annually through repeat visits and wasted crew time.
Anthony Ashbrook, chief executive and co-founder, said: “Ensuring that track workers get to the right place first time minimises the risk of a missed defect, keeping trains running safely and efficiently while making maintenance work itself safer.”
The company’s leadership includes chief technology officer Jon Owen, who helped digitally map the UK rail network, and head of operations Russel Licence, who spent almost two decades in senior roles at Network Rail. Chief commercial officer Justin Stroud is the former European managing director of Sperry Rail.
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Machines With Vision is expanding its work with other national railway infrastructure operators across Europe, North America and Australasia. It has also begun an external investment round to support continued international growth.
Ashbrook said: “We’re excited about our international expansion plans and expect to announce related contract wins in due course, as we accelerate our internationalisation with investors who share our vision.”
