The rail industry needs to work together as a system to improve performance and reduce cost.

For it to generate solutions that boost value for money, it needs to be able to have efficient access to knowledge of existing reports, sources of data, information on research projects and initiatives, details of centres of expertise and test facilities. However, knowledge that could help the rail industry work better tends to be widely dispersed in many different places and with different people.

There is no single place to bring this knowledge together and so it can be difficult for the people who want knowledge to connect with the people who have the knowledge.

As a result connections are often based on individual initiative and goodwill or simply good fortune!  And where there isn’t such good fortune it can mean that initiatives, research, changes encounter delays, waste resources or duplicate similar work.

In response, RSSB has set up SPARK – Sharing Portal for Access to Rail Knowledge.  SPARK aims to provide a way for the industry and others to work together and share knowledge more efficiently over the internet.

SPARK can be accessed from http://spark.rssb.co.uk/