The National Railway Museum (NRM) in York will exhibit examples of new technology looking to the future to how the railways could look for Britain. The exhibition will see amazing innovations over four exhibition seasons including Autonomous Technology, Decarbonisation, Smart Cities, and Communities.

Each of the four seasons will focus on different technologies and inventions and will be demonstrated to visitors who can see for themselves how they work.

Innovation Platform will also be part of the York Festival of Ideas which will take place on Saturday the 18th of June, at 11am and 1pm and will see visitors offered free guided tours of the exhibition.

The event will see Museum and University of York staff on hand to chat about the exhibit and the technology being displayed and to answer any questions.

Liv Mills, Exhibitions Project Manager at the National Railway Museum, said:

“Innovation Platform offers a great opportunity for museum visitors of all ages to come and explore the technologies that will shape the future of the railways that they will travel on. We’re really excited to be able to work with lots of different companies, organisations and partners to showcase this exhibition.”

The first of the exhibits is the Autonomous Technology season, which will start off by looking at Driverless Transport and how this could support the transfer of passengers to and from stations on the first and last legs of their journey. The exciting exhibition has been developed with the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP) which is a partnership of the University of York and Lloyd’s Register Foundation and will see a mock-up cab showing three screens of footage which simulate a driverless environment.

Visitors to the exhibition can use different overlays to the footage which will demonstrate how algorithms are used in autonomous driving technology to reveal objects and obstacles and also to help classify and identify how the vehicle will react to them.

The AAIP’s work aim is to make sure that any autonomous technology introduced is guaranteed to be safe.

Professor John McDermid, Director of the AAIP, said:

“As artificial intelligence and autonomous systems become increasingly mainstream, it’s important that everyone, not just the engineers and the developers, are aware of how we assure the safety of these incoming systems.
“This exhibit with the National Railway Museum is a fantastic way to help the public understand how machine learning – an essential part of how an autonomous vehicle understands the world around it – works, and how the research we are doing can help them to trust that the system will work safely and as expected.”

The Autonomous Technology exhibit will also feature Prometheus which is an inspection drone that will help Network Rail survey and map mine workings that extend under current rail infrastructure alongside ActiWheel, which sees a partnership between universities and industry companies to transform wheel sets on trains using computer-based systems to provide improved cornering performance and reduce track damage.

Each of the seasons will be displayed at the National Railway Museum for six months as follows:

• Autonomous Technology running from June to December 2022
• Decarbonisation from December 2022 to May 2023
• Smart Cities on display from June to December 2023
• Communities bringing in the New Year in 2024 to run until May.

Locomotion at Shildon will also take part in the Innovation Platform exhibit between January 2023 and December 2024.

For further information about Innovation Platform or to book a free guided tour, please visit: https://www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/innovation-platform