Professor Simon Iwnicki: It’s certainly more of an open brief at this stage, so I think you have to look at the basic facts and then through design we’re looking at differentiating it from other forms of transport. The brief to us was to design a capsule that would go up to 700kmph, it was going to take up to 40 people and it’s a short journey. All of those things - that’s not a train and it’s not an aeroplane either. You could say it’s more of an executive jet.

The fact that you’ll have multiple capsules or vehicles travelling immediately opens opportunities to design the interiors in a completely different way. There are opportunities to brand each capsule, perhaps, with a different brand. I find that interesting. So if you have a favourite coffee brand or fashion brand, then you could travel on that particular capsule. You could travel in more of a budget airline mode, or you could pay a little bit more to get more space. All of those things you can’t really do on trains because of the nature of the beast.

We are leading the work package on materials. In essence, what we are looking at is where we can use modern materials within the railway vehicle and modern manufacturing methods to improve its performance.

We're in the fairly early stages of the project still; it's been running for about four months now, so the plan currently is that we are identifying two case studies, on two different types of vehicle.

One is relatively low speed train, perhaps a metro vehicle, and for this we are looking at having novel suspension arrangements: so instead of having bogies, we might have just two actively controlled axles and no bogies, which would remove quite a lot of mass from the vehicle. The other case study is for a more conventional, higher speed vehicle with bogies.

Our plan is to look at those two case studies and identify where in the vehicle structure and the running gear we can use novel materials.

Firstly, we are looking at a technique where we would use robots to lay up the carbon fiber. Our partners at Milan have been using robots to place individual carbon fibers to make the components and they will be embedded in the matrix that links them all together. By doing it that way, the robot can place the fibres wherever you want them to.

So you can have the strength just where you need it so you don't need to waste material by adding weight where you don't need it. We're looking at mainly making sub-frames or bogie section using that technique, and that would be done at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy.

The second technique which we're looking at is additive manufacturing, possibly using steel. This will probably be done for smaller components, maybe around the axle boxes and other components within the running gear. Again in that way, we can make the materials in complex shapes so it has the strength where we need it. Both of those techniques should mean they can have structures that are lighter than conventional steel components.

I think we can achieve the technical  challenges – those are actually not the major challenges for this project. In fact, the biggest barriers are around standards and vehicle acceptance.

In other words, the railway industry is very used to working with steel, aluminium and a few other materials, but it's not used to working with these novel materials and novel manufacturing methods.

The railway industry has a very conservative culture, it's very risk-adverse and I suppose you could argue that has worked very well for it because railways are extremely safe. So people working in the railways are very reluctant to change things quickly as a result of that.

I think that culture is changing, but that's part of where our project will help – by identifying the benefits but also the potential problems with the different materials. These projects are very collaborative, with different partners around Europe, and I think Shift2Rail is doing good work in bringing that together.