CIO interview: Simon Moorhead of the Rail Delivery Group discusses integration

Impact of the pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated initiatives to replace paper ticketing, and Moorhead says the crisis has meant there is greater interest in getting real-time rail timetable information. “We have concentrated on carrying on running services to ensure key workers can get to and from their job at the start and end of the working day,” he says.

But as the lockdown eases and the country starts to go back to work, Moorhead says passengers, rail staff and policy-makers are beginning to see beyond paper tickets to digital ticketing, which means rail passengers no longer need to queue at train stations to buy and collect paper tickets.

“The more we can deliver remotely, the more we can give customers the confidence and certainty that they have a valid ticket to get them through the station barriers and to their destination on time,” he says.

“We saw a need to make connections and interfaces that unlock value in data”

Simon Moorhead, Rail Delivery Group

Many businesses aspire to build a seamless customer experience, and for rail passengers, the pandemic has been a stimulus, says Moorhead. “A whole series of things are coming together, which is being accelerated by the need to limit human to human contact.”

The digital ticketing project made use of components and programming practices that can be built upon and reused, he says. “Now we have a fast way to integrate, so we can focus on issues brought up by Covid-19.”

One of the new integration projects is being driven by the need to replace the APIs that tell passengers if their train service has been disrupted. “We can give people the information they need and connect to rail timetables,” says Moorhead. This will enable information such as alternative services to be presented in an easily accessible way that can be used by both consumers and businesses, he adds.

“My interest is to deliver to customers services that run once across the industry, such as rail enquiries, journey planning, railcard purchases and seat reservations,” he says.

Later this year, the Rail Delivery Group will have a new reservation system in place, says Moorhead. “We will have a core back-end SaaS [software as a service] reservation system that connects through APIs.”

In Moorhead’s experience, the coronavirus pandemic has shown that there is now an appetite to bring people back to the rail network and promote smart ticketing, and there has been a definite shift in the general attitude to technology-led change. “I love it that I have had a conversation with business colleagues, and they are now repeating back what I have been saying,” he says. “It speeds up work.”

But the rail industry does not move very quickly – there is a long tail of commercial contracts that will need to be unpicked. “When we procure new trains or services, they need to last 10 years,” says Moorhead.

Open access to rail data

Nevertheless, he sees huge opportunities in opening up APIs, given the wealth of train telemetry and station escalator data that can be tapped into.

Moorhead sits on the Rail Data Council, a group comprising Network Rail and train operators, which, he says, aims to raise the bar on data access, rather than build barriers to data. Among the roles of the Rail Delivery Network is to issue and publish standards, he says, adding: “Part of our agenda is to create a platform approach for ticketing.” 

Inspired by the airline industry, which has established global data standards, Moorhead would like to see the Rail Delivery Group’s API strategy evolve to support a rail data marketplace, offering participants a standard way to connect to open data. “This will speed up the integration of new entrants to the industry,” he says.