UK Public Sector Contracts & Tenders

Network Rail is looking to procure an end-to-end Virtual Accessibility Tours service for a baseline portfolio of 250 designated railway stations across Great Britain. The proposed service would include station surveys, LiDAR scanning, panoramic imagery, creation of accessible interactive virtual tours and supporting digital assets, publication support, testing, accessibility assurance, implementation, training, ongoing support and maintenance, content updates and future re-scanning services. The current delivery assumption is that, following a planned contract award in early February 2027, the first 100 station tours would be delivered, accepted and operational by June 2027, with the remaining 150 completed by October 2027. The purpose of this preliminary market engagement is to obtain supplier feedback on the draft requirements, the deliverability of the proposed timetable and the suitability of a fixed-price commercial model where the station composition and sequencing may change.

This is a key opportunity for Network Rail to identify the solutions available within the market and request information from the supply base to achieve the below: • Help inform the sourcing and requirement strategy • Identify any additional capabilities that Network Rail may have not considered • Understand what customisation options are available • Ensure suppliers who are interested in any potential future tender activity relating to this requirement are aware of the procurement platform that will be used, and provide them with the steps to complete qualification to this platform (should they not have already done so) Network Rail is undertaking preliminary market engagement to understand the market capabilities for a new Wheel Impact Load Detector (WILD) system. Our current systems were installed between late 2013 and mid-2015 and are nearing end of life. Network Rail currently has 73 instrumented tracks at 28 locations. The purpose of this notice is to gather information from the market on available technologies, system capabilities, delivery approaches and potential implementation models that could inform future procurement.

Network Rail is developing an Access and Use Policy that will set out how Great British Railways (GBR) will make decisions regarding access to GBR infrastructure for train operations. GBR will record these decisions in a new document called the ‘Infrastructure Capacity Plan.’ Network Rail is seeking a data management solution that could enable GBR to manage the train service specification data that will inform, feed into and support the Infrastructure Capacity Plan. GBR will require a data management solution to store and manage train service specification data, supporting the objective of establishing and maintaining a published Infrastructure Capacity Plan. The solution will also need to hold data about proposals to amend the Infrastructure Capacity Plan, and to manage change controls and auditing of the data. The solution should also support a clear relationship between service specification data and detailed train schedule data, enabling users to understand how proposed and approved specification changes relate to individual train schedules in the timetable and data held in other operational systems. For clarity, GBR will be responsible for developing and maintaining the Infrastructure Capacity Plan, including populating, editing and governing the data held within the solution. The supplier would be expected to provide the data management capability, not to own or determine the underlying train service specification decisions. Network Rail is developing this capability to support future GBR readiness and requires suppliers to consider both immediate implementation needs and long-term operational requirements. Please see the Request for Information document attached to the opportunity listing in Bravo for further information.