Case Study: Network Rail strengthens climate resilience with Fathom's flood risk data

Engineering climate resilience into the UK rail network

Network Rail, the owner and operator of Britain's railway infrastructure, needed to build climate resilience by assessing the growing flood risk to its assets across England, Scotland, and Wales. The challenge was obtaining consistent nationwide flood data, as the available public sources used different modeling methodologies and lacked uniform future climate scenarios. To address this, Network Rail's Weather Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation strategy team worked with engineering consultancies and used climate-conditioned data from Fathom.

Fathom provided a consistent, detailed dataset covering pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flooding for multiple return periods and future climate scenarios across all three nations. This data was integrated into Network Rail's systems and combined with asset data to create comprehensive hazard maps and, subsequently, a risk-scoring tool for individual assets. The solution from Fathom enabled Network Rail to make key data-driven decisions, prioritize investments, and develop long-term action plans for a more resilient rail network based on a comparable view of risk across the entire network.

Network Rail

David Quincey

Climate Adaptation Manager