OUR STORY
2016 – Our Origin
The Rail Innovation Group began as a small group of people from the rail & tech sector keen to see change happen on rail. After a few ad hoc conversations (rants/moans) we thought we should do something to help make change so we began with a workshop to ask, ‘what can we do to improve rail’. We realised that we should embrace culture change within rail & provide a welcoming first contact for start ups looking to supply to rail.
We met over a few months to workshop the challenge we all faced to deliver innovation within our work. This naturally this lead to our monthly Meet Ups as we became a community that looked forward to meeting up regularly.
We met monthly throughout 2017 regularly welcoming members from the Young Rail Professionals to make sure we bought rail’s young talent along the journey. Our numbers grew & we realised that rather than work through our current constraints, the Group needed to hear inspiring stories of how people had succeeded in bringing change or new products into the sector.
The knowledge & insight provided by the Meet Ups has been transformational for both rail & tech people who’ve attended – we’ve even seen some great business partnerships develop at the events.
By 2018 we were ready to go BIG with our vision so we arranged The Rail Innovation Group Forum where we bought 20 start up companies & invited people from across the rail industry to come & see what their tech had to offer. For us, this was a massive event where we got to show a huge rail audience the amazing companies that had joined our community.
The momentum grew throughout 2018 with our Meet Ups growing ever more popular. We made new friends along the way & could see the impact our neutral space was having to bring the two industries together.
In 2019 we decided to build on our presence within the sector to formally endorse people or products that had the potential to help in the development of new solutions for rail’s future so we introduced our Recognised Innovation Scheme.
We also partnered with Hitachi to create the first Start Up Rail event in Newcastle. This was our first outreach day where we visited a tech community to provide an insight on the opportunities available in the rail sector & allow potential start up entrants to make contacts amongst our invited rail colleagues.
We started 2020 with a high-profile launch of our Start Up Rail national tour to discover new start up talent in hubs across the UK. Just days before our first stop in Glasgow all our in person events had to be cancelled. We paused that programme for the duration of Covid and had a big sigh over a lot of abandoned work. Like other organisations we moved online, developing our Munch & Learn virtual meet ups; however, we see that networking is so key to establishing connections & making progress in the sector that we arranged in person events whenever guidance would allow. Following a few stops & starts, we were able to re-start our main Meet Up model in September 2021.
Our membership actually grew over the Covid period as media & government actions reinforced the essential role that the rail & the mobility sector had in maintaining both the passenger & freight distribution systems. Building on this interest, we undertook our study into the role of the rail network in the distribution of all types of items, leading to the publication in May 2021 of our Parcels as Passengers report.
2022 saw a full line up of Meet Ups, with a notable visit to our friends in Bristol as well as travelling to trade fairs across Europe to support our members in their export journey. Our conversations at these events identified the challenge of innovating within different industry structures across different countries - there's always more to do! With some new international members & a newly identified need to help members prepare for a world of data, we entered 2023 with a buzz in our step. Through detailed engagement with our members, we published our report Improving the Innovation Funding Ecosystem in April 2023, designed to kick-start a wider discussion of how funders might target their support to deliver more dynamic & responsive innovation cycles.
2023 - Partnerships and recognition
The second half of 2023 saw us take on Innovation Partner roles with the World Passenger Festival and RailLive, giving our members a foothold at major international events without the usual trade-fair expense. Closer to home, our members started picking up serious industry recognition. Several members were recipients of national awards across the year. That pattern of member wins has carried on since.
2024 - Going international
The international thread carried into 2024. We ran a member survey and a series of conversations to understand what actually helps a UK rail start-up win work abroad, and what gets in the way. The result was our Small Voices Expanding Horizons report, published in May 2024. It drew on members' experiences at Rail Live Madrid, Middle East Rail, InnoTrans, and elsewhere, and set out practical lessons on positioning, pavilion events, and working with UK government support schemes.
September 2024 took us to InnoTrans in Berlin, where our members were out in force on stands across the show. In October we worked with RSSB to host a session on the updated Rail Technical Strategy. The strategy's Critical Enablers (data-driven, effective innovation culture, technically talented workforce) were exactly what we'd been advocating for, so that was satisfying. In November we headed to RailLive in Zaragoza, where our Chair, Liam Henderson, was a judge at the start-up pitching competition. Our podcast, What Moves Us, hit its fifth anniversary!
2025 - Skills Beyond Scale, space, and supplier challenges
February 2025 brought Skills Beyond Scale, a report drawing on a skills audit across our membership and made the case that the rail industry should look inside its own SME supply chain before commissioning skills and technology from elsewhere.
We hosted a joint event with the European Space Agency, and the UK Space Agency, exploring how space-based assets can support data-driven digital systems in rail.
The shape of Start Up Rail also evolved: we delivered our first Supplier Challenge, in partnership with Heathrow Express. Over 40 suppliers travelled to Heathrow to pitch against three live operational briefs covering gateline access, communicating the premium service, and integrating the last mile beyond Paddington. Heathrow Express came away with a clear follow-up pipeline. We came away with a format that works.
The year closed with our partnership with ITS UK, announced in the autumn.
2026 - Ten years in
We kicked off our tenth year with a run of webinars on practical uses of AI for small companies. A second Supplier Challenge followed in March, this time with Hitachi Rail focused on Sheffield's light rail system.
To mark the decade, we ran a member-led review of how rail has changed across the ten years, seen through the eyes of the start-ups, SMEs, and scale-ups trying to enter and work within it. Small Voices, Big Impact: 10 Years of Innovation sets out what has improved, where the structural barriers remain, and what still needs to change if rail is to make full use of the innovation it already attracts. The headline finding is that the sector is no longer short of ideas. What it lacks are consistent pathways from trial to adoption.
The first in our anniversary event series, Closing the Gap: Female Founders and the UK's Growth Ambition, is hosted with BT at the BT Tower in May. More to follow through the year.
A Decade Defining Innovation
When a member joins the Rail Innovation Group, we ask them to submit their own definition of innovation. The definitions below come from members across our first ten years. They've shaped how we think about the work and what we look for in new ideas.