Nine organisations have been selected to receive a share of funding worth £3 million for research into proposals to reduce the cost of electrification schemes by avoiding the need to reconstruct bridges and tunnels.

The Future Railway electrification competition was managed by RSSB in partnership with Network Rail and the Department for Transport. The winners are: Balfour Beatty, DGauge, Electren, Freyssinet, IDOM, PCAT Consortium, Tata Steel, TRL and URS.

The proposed solutions to avoid reconstruction include: new design tools, innovative ways to reduce the construction depth of overhead line electrification equipment, and new track-lowering and bridge-jacking techniques. Feasibility studies will run until January 2015, after which finalists will be chosen to proceed to the demonstrator phase.

David Clarke, a director of Future Railway, said: “Altering and reconstructing bridges and tunnels is roughly 25% of the cost of electrification, so we saw this as an area worth exploring for new cost-reduction opportunities. It is great to announce the start of the feasibility studies on nine very credible but novel ideas from suppliers. We hope this will lead to the railway being able to deliver more electrification with the funding available.”

The electrification programme is one of a series of competitions to promote innovation within the rail industry. Previous Future Railway projects have included competitions to improve ticket detection at busy gate-lines, to redesign rolling stock, to exploit remote condition monitoring, to improve the design and aesthetics of overhead line gantries, the Radical Train project, a pantograph measurement device competition, and the battery-powered train (IPEMU) project with Network Rail.