General Technological Change and Innovation in Railway

Literature review:

GENERAL TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND INNOVATION IN RAILWAY

According to Sultan and Chan (2000), the key catalyst that drives all the organizations to success is the adoption of advancing and changing technology. Railway industry is one of the few engineering organizations which have multiple disciplines like civil, mechanical, electrical, computer, production and industrial engineering and hence new or change in technology in any of those disciplines could improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency in which the railways have been operating.

With the introduction of AutoCAD, the rail industry has been able to design and construct high speed efficient trains which has reduced the travel time and also made the travelling experience more comfortable for the commuters. AutoCAD is a computer application which could be used to generate two and three dimensional designs. It’s not just the technological advancement in mechanical, but also in software which had helped rail to manage their work and also made the travel simple and easy for the commuters. It’s the Crew Management software that helped railways to manage their employees with their roster systems. This actually saved them lot of time, money and also was free of probable human error (Sahin and Yuceoglu 2011). On the other hand, it is the technological advancement in civil and constructional engineering and also with the help of software; railways have been successful in building Underground Railroad in the major cities of the world thus avoiding the existing traffic (Ramanathan and KalyanKumar 2013). Technology in communication engineering has also allowed railways to build an efficient communication system. Its the use of GSM-R technology that enabled railways to establish an efficient connection between drivers and signallers (TIngTIng and Bin 2010).

Rail Corp has some significant innovative results and IT systems throughout the past years. One example of this can be the application of the digital train radio. Having the Metronet radio network, being close to lose its operational ability, a new system should be created to help. Being a new and more carefully constructed system, the digital train radio will increase the safety factor of the train passengers. Another significant advantage of this system will be the ability that provides to station memfor thebers (such as station workers) to communicate with each other. More specifically about its functions, “The new system will be interoperable for all rail operations on the RailCorp network and will facilitate an integrated voice communications system for train control, signalling, train crew, shunting, trackside and security personnel.” (Earthmover & civil contractor, 2010

IT SYSTEM IN RAILCORP

).

Another significant IT system that Rail