East Midlands Railway

Established as a franchise by Abellio in 2019, East Midlands Railway (EMR) connects people and places across the East Midlands and through to London. Working in partnership to connect cities, support communities and create easier journeys for everyone, EMR is investing £600 million in bringing customer improvements to its services, trains and stations.  

As part of this investment, the company is improving its trains and introducing a new intercity fleet, as well as refurbishing two new, faster and more modern regional fleets. To keep passengers up-to-date, they have launched a new website, mobile app and ticket-buying facilities, while encouraging Smartcard use to help reduce paper waste and streamline the travel experience.  

To deliver these significant infrastructure and service improvements, EMR needed to increase its network connectivity capacity by a factor of four, while also adding previously unconnected green field station sites to its network for the first time, representing approximately one-third of their overall station estate. This was an obligation put to EMR by the Department for Transport to ensure it could provide excellent passenger connectivity across all EMR stations.  

Key to delivering these objectives was upgrading and replacing legacy IT infrastructure hardware, software and services inherited by EMR when they took over the franchise. The existing technologies were not only both costly and unstable, they didn’t provide the data connectivity needed by 21st-century passengers, who expect to be able to use their digital devices at all times. 

Our solution has provided EMR with significantly more bandwidth at previously connected sites and connectivity into green field locations that no network infrastructure before the project was initiated. 

“We saw huge improvements in our key “Category A” stations with footfall increases going from 100 Mbps connectivity to dual 300Mbps connectivity,” explained Lee Styles, Head of IT at East Midlands Railways. “A great example of this is our critical station in Nottingham, which increased from 20 Mbps to dual 300 Mbps”. 

Overall, EMR experienced:   

• Quadrupled bandwidth of previous capacity at 70% of its stations and doubled capacity at a further 12%, achieving its Department for Transport obligation    

• Levels of “acceptable” connectivity rose from approximately 30% to 100%  

The Total Cost of Ownership has significantly improved, with connectivity across each site now costing thousands of pounds less per year to operate than before, with the upgraded and newly installed infrastructure acting as a catalyst for EMR to implement more effective retail solutions – an average cost reduction of 40% per station. This includes upgraded ticket machines, smart ticketing, new customer information screens and a major expansion of station Wi-Fi performance for customers.