09 Apr 2025

Loud and clear call for greater industry collaboration at the Heavy Haul Conference

The RISSB team were fully immersed at the Heavy Haul Conference and the Turnouts Workshop in Perth in late March.

RISSB CEO Damien White delivered a keynote address that explored opportunities beyond the planned introduction of mandatory standards for a small number of critical interoperability subjects.

Damien focused on the opportunity to drive much greater change in what will be a very wide range of non-mandatory standards – rail’s role in national productivity and decarbonisation efforts relies on the industry (and RISSB) being far more ambitious in its change aspirations. It is likely that any future standards organisation will need to be taking a far different approach to the prioritisation of its work, the development of standards, and ensuring greater levels of adoption and benefit realisation.

Senior Standards Development Manager Cris Fitzhardinge and Standards Development Manager Jodie Matheson co-chaired the 2025 Turnouts Conference, guiding the conversations seamlessly as experts shared their learnings and best-practices to improve safety, performance and reliability for this critical rail infrastructure.

We also presented a case study on AS 7655 Wayside Electrical Charging Interfaces for Battery Electric Rolling Stock – a world first standard, driving interoperability for the Australian railway industry. Reduction of Australia’ s carbon footprint is a key government policy, and transport plays a major part in the implementation of that policy. Rail transport is already seen as being a low carbon transport alternative, only contributing 4% of transport emissions. Sign up for a webinar on the topic on Tuesday 29 April.

The importance of collaboration within the rail industry to tackle the upcoming challenges was a key theme at the Heavy Haul Conference and came through loud and clear from all the Speakers.

RISSB fully supports this. By working closely together, sharing knowledge and experiences, RTOs, manufacturers, research organisations, and bodies such as RISSB, can enable the rail industry to progress new technologies, tackle interoperability challenges, and be ready for net zero emissions.

Collectively the industry has amazing potential to collaborate, as demonstrated through our Development Groups, product consultation process and engagement with our members. To realise those opportunities, RISSB is looking to significantly change its approaches to the prioritisation of its program, take a stronger leadership role in its product development processes.

As RISSB goes through the process of building our Work Plan 2025-26, the Heavy Haul Conference and the Turnouts Workshop have provided us valuable perspective on industry trends, which we will explore further through our consultation process.

Thanks to all those who dropped by the RISSB exhibition booth to find out more about our training programs and to have a chat about RISSB’s work. There was genuine interest in the expanded RISSB Horizons program, especially the opportunity to attend the Program in Perth this year. The Horizons Program is open for registrations, with options to join either Horizons West or Horizons East.