Railway system segmentation in major renewal or extension projects

Systems engineering is becoming increasingly accepted as a means of achieving successful railway projects (Allan and Williams, 1996). However, in these projects, there also exists a long tradition of segmenting railway systems into such areas as rolling stock, signalling, power supply, permanent way, stations, etc. To a large extent, this segmentation is also reflected in the railway supply industry. However, there are a number of reasons why new types of segmentation are worthy of consideration and some of these, architectural aspects in particular, are discussed in this paper