Overcoming challenges to improve rail maintenance productivity safely
Post-COVID, many rail infrastructure owners face enormous pressure to reduce costs, often leading to underinvestment in infrastructure asset renewals/upgrades and more reliance on maintenance. This “maintenance debt” typically reduces asset reliability and service performance. While there are no simple solutions, infrastructure owners remain committed to progress. Drawing on international benchmarking data and real-world examples, this Viewpoint explores how rail infrastructure companies can crack this “tough nut” and make a step change in maintenance productivity, balancing performance, efficiency, and safety.
THE HEADWINDS FOR RAIL INFRASTRUCTURE OWNERS
Across the world, the rail industry is still seeing the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the EU, rail passenger demand suddenly halved from its 2019 levels, recovering only slowly from 2023 onward. Today, total demand in passenger km has almost recovered in many countries, although revenues are still lower than before, reflecting different commuting patterns and hybrid working. The drop in revenues and above-inflation increase in costs over the last five years have put enormous pressure on railway infrastructure funding, with governments often struggling to make up the shortfall in a tight economic environment.
The impact on service performance has been far too visible for many rail passengers — reduced punctuality, service cancellations, and inevitable disruptions — resulting in reduced customer trust and satisfaction. At the same time, there is an ongoing need to manage safety for passengers and the workforce to acceptable levels. The UK rail industry provides a good illustration of the financial challenge since COVID.
As shown in Figure 1, reduced income levels and rising costs have led to an additional funding gap of £5 billion in 2023–2024 compared to 2018–2019. In practice, this led to a 17% drop in funding for infrastructure renewals in 2023–2024, although there has been an 8% increase in maintenance funding, putting the net reduction in maintenance activities at 9%.
Figure 1. Financial performance of the British rail industry
In addition to the challenge of reduced funding, historical funding shortfalls have already contributed to lower asset reliability, which is seen in a record 5.1% service cancellation rate (the highest since reporting started in 2014). This, in turn, has led to increased passenger claims, totaling £139 million.
Improving asset reliability with reduced funding requires infrastructure owners to increase maintenance productivity to both improve asset performance and reliability and optimize the cost of maintenance and failure. Considering one key measure of productivity, in the UK, maintenance workers typically spend just 35%-45% of their paid time actually working on assets, which would suggest significant scope for improvement.
Yet this is nothing new. While the urgency for progress may have increased in recent years, the need for greater productivity has been a priority for many decades. So why is productive maintenance such a tough nut to crack?
Part of the answer lies in the basic nature of railways, which differ significantly from, say, large manufacturing facilities. Rail infrastructure assets are stretched out over long distances, making logistics and access difficult. They have long replacement cycles, which can pose difficulties with legacy assets that often lack reliable data. Additionally, rail systems consist of multiple systems with incompatible datasets.
Moreover, railways experience high usage and are often safety-critical, constraining when and how maintenance can be done. Access to the rail network for maintenance has been further constrained by higher service frequencies to meet rising demand. On top of this, more stringent safety processes, such as the recent ban on “red zone working” in the UK (i.e., work on or near running lines), have been implemented across many parts of Europe, further complicating maintenance efforts.
Additional common headwinds that are especially relevant today include:
Maintenance debt. Often, the biggest problem is not how to maintain asset condition at its current levels but rather how to break through the vicious cycle of reduced budgets, resulting in asset deterioration that in turn requires more budget in the future. Asset life extension is not in itself a poor short-term strategy, but the resulting increased maintenance costs and emphasis on “firefighting” put further pressure on a company’s ability to work proactively and invest for the future. Eventually, assets will reach a condition in which they become economically unviable to maintain.
Inflation. In line with global trends, costs have risen significantly for rail materials, services, and labor costs over the last few years. Global inflation rates doubled to more than 5% over the last three years compared to the previous 10 years, which is reflected in new pay deals for rail personnel as well as increased material costs. Due to public pressure, typically only a fraction of the increased costs is passed on to customers and passengers.
Unionization. Unionization is strong in the rail industries across many countries, including Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany. While union representation offers clear benefits and protections for the workforce, it also presents challenges to changing working practices, especially for the introduction of new technology that could reduce labor intensity. For instance, after 12 months of strikes in the UK in 2022 and 2023, network rail members reached a three-year pay deal with the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), which represents over 67,000 rail workers, including signalers and maintenance workers. According to a report from RailAdvent, the agreement included a 15% base salary increase, while network-requested changes to terms and conditions aimed at supporting maintenance modernization were removed from the deal. Similar challenges are facing rail infrastructure activities in Portugal, Spain, and Belgium, where services have often been brought to a complete standstill. The main reasons cited for the disruptions are demands for higher pay, better working conditions, or a rejection of proposed reforms to improve the performance and service.
Cultural legacy. Although elements of competition have been introduced into many of the world’s railways, rail infrastructure management and operations are usually noncompetitive, though subject to various performance-based incentives from transport authorities and governments. As a result, the culture often focuses on spending allocated budgets rather than improving service, performance, and efficiency as an existential need. Despite many examples of innovation, railway infrastructure management remains highly conservative, relying on compliance with large numbers of technical and operational standards. In our experience, challenging these standards, even where evidence suggests they are pushing costs too high, can be very difficult. Additionally, some local maintenance practices can discourage performance improvement. For example, completing work within planned working week periods may reduce the need for overtime pay, which many workers rely on as a supplement to their base salary.
Partly in response to client requests, in 2024, Arthur D. Little (ADL) initiated a new international Rail Infrastructure Maintenance Benchmark to take a fresh look at how to overcome these challenges and identify the latest “best in class” practices for rail maintenance. The benchmark covered a range of maintenance topics, including organization, monitoring, and inspection; access planning; task planning; and maintenance delivery. Building on the benchmark results and recent client examples, the remainder of this Viewpoint highlights the current state of the industry and outlines the key priorities for driving change.
FINDINGS FROM OUR INTERNATIONAL BENCHMARK
Based on benchmark results from major national railway infrastructure owners across Europe and Asia, one of the most notable trends is that rail maintenance practices are substantially less mature than other sectors. In each area, infrastructure owners scored their current practices on a scale of 1 to 4 (1: basic, 2: traditional, 3: intermediate, and 4: advanced). Across all participating organizations, 69% of scores fell within Levels 1 or 2, and fewer than 1% reached Level 4. Key areas of low maturity include:
Limited use of data to drive maintenance decisions. The systematic exploitation of data to go beyond planned maintenance and base interventions on asset usage, condition, or predicted failures is still limited. When such approaches are explored, providers struggle to move from specific applications and pilots toward full integration. For example, points operating equipment, which can swing up to 2,500x each week on some tracks, often receive the same level of maintenance as those that swing only once, despite significant differences in usage.
Lack of structured approach to total cost of ownership optimization. While asset data is increasingly collected, it is often used only sporadically to optimize the total cost of ownership, a critical factor for informing maintenance and renewal strategies.
Weakness in asset data strategy and consolidation. Consolidating data, such as asset maintenance history, faults, and condition, is still a work in progress. In many cases, datasets from separate gathering and monitoring systems are not combined and used systematically, leading companies to fall back onto one-size-fits-all maintenance approaches that fail to distinguish between different asset conditions, recent fault history, or levels of criticality. Lack of long-term strategy and investment in this area to develop and manage the structuring, quality, and use of data holds many organizations back.
Limited use and impact of remote condition monitoring (RCM). While RCM is used in most organizations, it typically covers only 10%-30% of the assets in service. Manual inspections still supplement RCM, and they rarely impact planned fixed maintenance schedules. While all organizations surveyed were developing this area, the ability of organizations to gather and make decisions that impact maintenance activities is still early in development, with few examples of its use improving maintenance effectiveness.
Underutilization of automation technology. Robotics and other automation technologies are not yet widespread. While challenges such as data inconsistencies and widely varying environmental conditions make implementation difficult, there is significant potential value in automating the maintenance of critical, high-repetition activities or those with restricted human access. Currently, trials exist, but regular use of these solutions remains rare to see.
Lack of whole-system approaches. While whole-system approaches can enhance overall asset performance by optimizing both maintenance and operations (e.g., improving train services and revenue), siloed functions, such as track and signaling teams working independently, are still prevalent. Decision-making tends to focus on short-term gains rather than whole-life, long-term outcomes.
Overall, these findings suggest that many rail infrastructure owners face significant barriers to applying more strategic approaches to asset maintenance. Overcoming these challenges will require changes in ways of working and culture, data management practices, and the adoption of innovative technology.
CRACKING THE NUT
While there is no single or easy solution, the benchmark, together with recent ADL experience working with rail infrastructure owners, suggests six priorities for breaking out of the vicious cycle, transforming organizational culture and ways of working, and improving safety (see Figure 2):
Create a compelling case for change that engages all functions and levels. A key first step is to agree on the case for change by bringing together infrastructure owners and rail operators at regional and local levels and engaging all levels of the workforce, including trade unions. This should include a clear commitment to go beyond a one-size-fits-all planned maintenance approach toward data-driven approaches, including condition-based and predictive methods used to make decisive operational decisions as well as to drive more optimized planned maintenance strategies upstream. Such a shift must be reinforced with appropriate changes in KPIs and incentives, along with a review of leadership and governance processes and capabilities. Good practices in this area include introducing shared measures of success and performance-related pay incentives for key leaders and staff (including infrastructure teams) based on the delivery of efficiency and reliability outcomes, supported by the best private sector expertise.
Strengthen asset strategies for integrating new technologies. A strong focus should be placed on developing better processes for introducing, rolling out, and integrating new technologies such as RCM. Too often, trials and pilots are managed locally and rely on solution-focused, single-supplier approaches rather than being coordinated centrally through robust technology scouting and structured consideration of a range of solutions to address a well-defined set of problems. This leads to inconsistent technology choices across different parts of the organization and creates “not invented here” resistance during implementation, especially when budgets and decision-making are localized. It can also lead to unnecessary — and potentially expensive — technology deployments where simpler solutions can be deployed or repurposed to produce the type of data required to address the problem. There is a clear opportunity in the use of robotics and other automation technologies that have a significant potential to increase the speed and accuracy of both inspection and repeatable maintenance activities. A good example seen at one operator involves a robotic machine that completes inspection and complex measurements of track switches — an activity that traditionally takes two workers most of a day to do but which now can be done in one or two hours with greater accuracy and efficiency.
Embrace centralized planning. Planning rail maintenance is inherently complex due to shifting requirements and the difficulty of managing access. Yet in many organizations, planning and resource allocation are managed on a day-to-day basis in local silos. Cultural resistance to change is common, particularly where local leadership has been promoted internally without adequate management training and often operates with a unionized mindset. Moving toward more centralized planning is essential for achieving meaningful improvements. Ideally, this should be supported by modern technology tools that enable the optimization of plans, incorporating the necessary last-minute changes required to address service faults.
Tackle the data/systems challenge. Legacy software and hardware systems, themselves contributing to fragmented data management, remain significant barriers to progress. Many rail networks have evolved piecemeal over long periods, leading to a proliferation of incompatible systems, outdated technology, inconsistent data access, disjointed data representation, and poor data quality. Developing a coherent and effective strategic plan for data quality, integration, and governance, as well as for new systems development, is the only way to resolve these challenges. While such efforts need to be driven by a clear long-term vision, it is critical to follow an iterative implementation approach rooted in prioritized data access and exploitation use cases to ensure that up-front costs and effort are quickly rewarded by tangible benefits and that practical learnings are generated and implemented to show tangible benefits. Once data becomes accessible, joined up, reliable, and trusted, there is huge potential to apply AI tools to support rapid decision-making, real-time replanning, and optimized solutions.
Shift from short-term to long-term funding perspective. While many organizations operate under multiyear funding cycles in theory, in practice, their budgets are often subject to quarterly and annual volatility due to ongoing issues and events. To break this cycle, organizations need to commit to long-term strategic planning and establish ring-fenced budgets that are protected from short-term pressures. Although easier said than done, this shift is essential for supporting stable investment and sustainable improvements.
Change the poacher/gamekeeper mindset. In many organizations, a deep divide exists between central technical and standards functions and the local teams that deliver maintenance activities in the field. This divide often fosters a culture of mutual blame when standards, efficiency, or safety goals are not met. Repairing this disconnect requires the establishment of shared objectives and collective responsibility focused on optimizing standards and practices, combined with a user-centric approach to problem solving that ultimately helps on-the-ground adoption. A further enhancement in this approach can be the inclusion of trusted supply chain expertise, creating high-performing public-private partnerships that deliver repeatable work under shared incentives and targets. Such arrangements lead to better commercial outcomes through improved use of public and private workforces and support long-term thinking, innovation, and investment. Importantly, they help capture the knowledge and best practices developed across the system.
Together, these six priorities offer a path to a safer, more efficient, and more resilient rail network.
Figure 2. Six priorities to crack the rail maintenance nut
Conclusion
HOW TO MOVE FORWARD
There is no easy shortcut to making the above priorities happen. Top leadership commitment and management resolve are essential to push through the required shift away from reactive firefighting to strategic management. The essential prerequisites are:
Develop and commit to a long-term vision and strategy to support the progressive push of data-driven approaches, such as condition-based and predictive maintenance, and the use of new technology, automation, and AI tools and solutions. As well as describing the case for change, the strategy must further detail the means to measure performance and progress. It should include supplier incentives and be tested, proven, and fully implemented over a multiyear timeframe with board sponsorship, support, and funding.
Transform the rail operating model (governance, performance management, new shared processes, and incentives) involving central, local, and train operator leadership and ideally including key private sector supply chains. This should ensure aligned objectives and structures, and it should support innovation and relentless focus on resolving challenges and delivering tangible improvements in outcomes. Ideally, this should include bringing together infrastructure owner and train operations teams with shared goals.
Find new ways of engaging with the workforce to jointly achieve better productivity and modernization, while maintaining safety. Strategic engagement with trade unions may be an important aspect of this (e.g., to agree on how to link productivity and modernization to long-term pay deals).
Plan a program of work that includes focused proof-of-concept phases, leading to wider rollout and ensuring that these maintain the focus, sustained and consistent senior sponsorship, supported by good communication and engagement at all levels.
To crack the nut requires bravery, resilience, and persistence — but the prize is worth the effort.
