The East Coast Digital Programme (ECDP) is a landmark scheme that will introduce in-cab digital signalling on the southern part of the East Coast Main Line, between London King's Cross and Grantham. The first part of the deployment, Northern City Line (NCL), went live with Level 2 ETCS overlay in November 2023. As we approach the one-year anniversary, we will hear from Vanessa Wragg and John Crossland about how the rail industry are taking a new, collaborative approach to ensuring the success of the live system.
Vanessa and John will give a talk about the ERTMS Technical Support Engineers; the UK rail network's first dedicated ERTMS support team. They’ll take a look at how the team was built from the ground up, where their expertise lies across the complex system of systems (including trackside, onboard, and non-ETCS interfaces), and what a typical day looks like as they investigate system events. In addition, they’ll also explore the qualities that make their team successful and will end with an open forum discussion should participants have any questions.
Vanessa Wragg is Area Services Manager within Network Rail's East Coast route maintenance function, which includes responsibility for ERTMS technical support engineering who focus on diagnosing and triaging errors within the ERTMS system of systems. Van joined Network Rail 6 years ago and has experience of project management for schemes in telecoms renewals, major projects, and ERTMS.
John Crossland is a Network Rail Programme Manager supporting the East Coast Digital Programme focussing on ETCS maintenance. He is an Infrastructure Maintenance SME and has worked on ECDP since 2018. In the last few years John has worked with a range of ECDP Partners to build a holistic ETCS Maintenance Operating Model which is being piloted on the Northern City Line. His railway career started back in 1993 as an S&T Management Trainee and prior to working on ECDP, John spent over 20 years in a variety of infrastructure maintenance management roles around Yorkshire.