Our fleet: machines and vehicles
Our work
- GSM-R: the railway’s mobile communication system
- Our regions
- Digital Railway
- Long-term planning
- Looking after the railway
- Asset management
- Asset Protection and Optimisation
- Bridges, tunnels and viaducts
- Delays explained
- Earthworks: cutting slopes and embankments
- Level crossings
- Our fleet: machines and vehicles
- Planned works
- Litter and fly-tipping
- Responding to weather impacts on the railway
- Signalling
- Track
- Vegetation management
- Our routes
- Anglia route
- About the Anglia route
- Improving the railway in Anglia
- Keeping our communities safe in Anglia
- East Coast route
- East Midlands route
- North & East route
- West Coast South route
- North West route
- Central route
- Kent route
- South East upgrade
- Hither Green station Access for All improvements
- Peckham Rye station upgrade
- Shortlands station Access for All improvements
- Blackheath Tunnel Upgrade
- Hungerford Railway Bridge Refurbishment
- Lewisham resignalling
- Landslip prevention works at Chislet
- Upgrading the sea defences at Folkestone Warren
- Renewing the lifts at Sevenoaks station
- Petts Wood station footbridge refurbishment
- Hastings to Tunbridge Wells, and Hastings to Bexhill line closure
- Bexley station subway
- Dartford Junction: Line closure between Dartford and Gravesend
- South East upgrade
- Sussex route
- Network Rail High Speed
- Scotland route
- Wales route
- Wessex route
- Wessex railway upgrade plan
- Heart of Wessex line upgrades
- Feltham and Wokingham re-signalling programme
- Portsmouth Direct Upgrade
- Wessex Access for All schemes
- Improving London Waterloo station
- West of England line improvements
- Island Line Improvements
- North Downs Line signalling upgrade
- Portsmouth and Portcreek area improvement work
- Staines to Windsor improvement work
- Barnes to Feltham via Hounslow Upgrades
- Berrylands Station Upgrade
- London Waterloo and Clapham Junction line closures
- Reading improvement works
- Bournemouth to Dorchester South Line Renewals
- New Malden to Twickenham Renewals
- Western route
- South West Rail Resilience Programme
- Oxfordshire Connect
- Tackley Level Crossing
- Bristol Rail Regeneration
- Dartmoor Line
- MetroWest rail upgrades
- Old Oak Common lineside logistics compound
- Devizes Gateway feasibility study
- HS2 Old Oak Common Station
- Mid Cornwall Metro
- The Portishead Line
- Gloucester signal box upgrade
- Langport bridge
- Frome Railway Bridge
- Autumn drainage work in Somerset
- Anglia route
- Train operating companies
- Living by the railway
- Railway Upgrade Plan
Our fleet of vehicles and machinery works hard all year round.
Whether measuring and repairing rail faults, surveying the railway from above, clearing snow, or transporting materials, we have machines for the job.
Watch our video to find out more about our fleet
Our machines and specialist trains
Looking after the railway presents many challenges. Our fleet are based at strategic locations around the country, according to the tasks they do, so they’re ready to get to work on the railway when needed.
Here are some of the types of work we do where the machines we use are invaluable:
- infrastructure monitoring – from trains that use ultrasound to find faults within the rails, to those that monitor and record track geometry (our New Measurement Train or NMT)
- maintaining and renewing the tracks
- transporting materials such as ballast and rails for our work – this includes our rail delivery train, on-track plant delivery team, and aggregates wagons
- maintaining and installing overhead line equipment
- inspecting and clearing drainage
- maintenance support (such as our mobile maintenance train, or MMT – our ‘workshop on wheels’)
- testing ECTMS/in-cab signalling for the Digital Railway.
We own many of the machines we use, but sometimes suppliers provide them for our work programmes, and at other times we work with suppliers to adapt vehicles to suit our needs.
Find out more about our machines and vehicles
Did you know?
- Our fleet teams have 24/7, 365-day access to a helpline to support moving them around the network, helping to manage when incidents occur, as well as to report the critical information directly across the network including each Route Operating Control.
- Measuring almost one kilometre, our High Output ballast cleaner is the longest train on our network.
- Not all our fleet teams use machines that run on rails. Our Air Operations team makes use of a helicopter and unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs, or drones). We also have on-track plant that can travel on the roads as well as the railway. Examples include diggers, vehicles to inspect and clear drainage, mobile flashbutt welders (to weld the rails), track movers (which pick up and move track), and some of the vehicles we use to inspect and renew overhead wires.