Contracts for Innovation: FOAK 2025 – Bridge Strikes (UK)

The FOAK Programme addresses industry challenges by running innovation competitions. The competitions focus on collaboration with industry and deliver high maturity demonstrations, enabling efficient integration into the railway system. This competition aims to support innovative suppliers for market readiness.

Focus Areas

• They encourage applicants to focus on innovative solutions which:
  • harness technology to reduce the likelihood and impact of bridge strikes, addressing the challenges outlined
  • address multiple challenges outlined
  • are not targeted to a specific bridge or vehicle and confer a wider reaching benefit, for example, national initiatives
  • address realistic operational scenarios and demonstrate potential partnerships with relevant stakeholders, for example, bridge owners, local highway authorities, enforcement agencies or freight and bus operators
  • consider a broad range of different kinds of vehicles that can be involved in bridge strikes, acknowledging variations in regulations
  • consider psychological and behavioural factors that contribute to bridge strikes.

Themes

• This competition theme focuses on bridge strikes. They are seeking innovative solutions to prevent bridge strikes and mitigate their impact when they occur.
• Network Rail, a major owner of bridge assets, has a bridge strike strategy which focusses on two aspects:
  • reducing the likelihood of bridge strikes
  • mitigating their impact on railway safety, operational performance and road users when they occur
• Innovation opportunities should address these two aspects and generally fall into two categories which improve the bridge environment and those which support vehicle drivers and operators.
  • Improvements in the bridge environment may aim to:
    • prevent bridge strikes from occurring
    • minimise damage to infrastructure or trains if they do occur
    • improve detection of incidents and reduce response times
    • reduce time taken to remove temporary restrictions following bridge strike incidents
    • improve data gathering, to help understand the root cause of incidents and also gather evidence to support financial recovery
  • Improvements to support vehicle drivers and operators may aim to:
    • dynamically plan and re-plan routes to avoid low bridges or alert drivers to low clearance obstructions nearby
    • ensure drivers know their vehicle’s accurate, up to date height before each journey
    • assist drivers in interpreting signage and explore how technology can safely intervene if warnings are ignored
    • enhance awareness and education efforts
    • prevent poor alignment with arch bridges
    • reduce errors in stowing loads

Funding Information

• A total of up to £4.7 million, inclusive of VAT, is allocated to this competition across all four themes.
• Contracts of up to £200,000, inclusive of VAT will be awarded to develop a prototype and undertake field testing between three to seven months and must be completed by 31 March 2026.
• They expect to fund a minimum of two projects per theme and up to 23 projects across all four themes.

Eligibility Criteria

• Your project
  • Projects must:
    • start by 1 September 2025
    • end by 31 March 2026
    • last between three to seven months
    • have total costs of no more than £200,000, inclusive of VAT
  • Projects must always start on the first of the month, even if this is a non-working day. You must not start your project until your Contract has been approved by Innovate UK.
  • You must only include eligible project costs in your application. See their overview of eligible project costs. For specific guidance, see the eligibility section in this competition.
• Applicant
  • To lead a project, you can:
    • be an organisation of any size
    • work alone or with the subcontracted skills and expertise of others from businesses, research organisations, research and technology organisations or the third sector (charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups).
  • Contracts will be awarded to a single legal entity only. The majority of the project work and key deliverables including the project demonstration and trialling must be completed by the applicant and be carried out in the UK. Subcontractors can be used, but only for specialist skills.
  • They expect you to include an integration supporter in your project to help facilitate the demonstration of your technology. The demonstration should be in a suitable railway environment to allow the effective evaluation of the solution.
  • Your project could involve, for example:
    • an owner of railway assets, for example, stations, rolling stock or infrastructure
    • an experienced railway organisation
    • a rail organisation that has the potential to become a customer
  • They recommend approaching potential integration supporters as early as possible during the application process or early stages of your project. This ensures your industry relationships are well established before delivering the project demonstration. They welcome projects that include an innovative start up supply company that is already delivering in another sector.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.