Fugro wins Innovate UK ‘First of a Kind’ funding to support rail industry innovation

Fugro is one of the successful companies to win innovation funding from Innovate UK’s ‘First of a Kind’ (FOAK2020) competition under the theme of optimised and cost-effective rail maintenance. The FOAK2020 award will fund nine months of development of Fugro’s Innotamp project in collaboration with Network Rail. A world-first for track maintenance, the funded project will demonstrate how track alignments generated using Geo-data from Fugro’s Raildata Solution can be directly uploaded to a tamper’s computer to optimise tamping of railway lines. The FOAK2020 innovation programme, funded by the Department for Transport (DfT) and managed by Innovate UK, aims to demonstrate how proven technologies can be integrated into a railway environment for the first time (‘first of a kind’ demonstrations). It encourages innovation in the rail industry using novel technologies such as RILA and new ways of applying data. www.fugro.com