South Western Railway (SWR) customers could soon be able to see how busy train carriages are following an innovative collaboration.

The system uses onboard CCTV cameras to anonymously ‘count’ the number of passengers in each carriage in real-time.

It is currently in trial mode, with the company planning to make the data immediately available to customers via the SWR app and website, allowing them to make decisions even before they arrive at the station.

The trial is timely, as travel restrictions ease and the railway maximises efforts to allow customers to travel with confidence again.

As the train network welcomes passengers back, it hopes the new technology will help customers to maintain social distancing and avoid overcrowding.

SWR plans to make it customer facing and roll it out across their Class 444 and 450 fleets as soon as possible, and ultimately network-wide, if the pilot is successful.

SWR

SWR

Commercial Director of SWR, Peter Williams said: “We know that there are lots of things that feel uncertain at the moment, that’s why we’re doing all we can to help make travelling with us as smooth and safe as possible.

“In addition to helping maintain social distancing, and improving customer comfort and convenience, we hope to use this enhanced information to inform decision making in our control room, and further improve the punctuality and reliability of our services.”

The enhanced information is the result of a collaboration between SWR, AI technology company PoS Insights, and on-board Wi-Fi provider Icomera.

Peter Kingsland, Icomera’s Senior Vice President for UK, Asia & Australia, said: “Icomera is delighted to work with South Western Railway and PoS Insights to enable this exciting new solution.

“The ability to effectively monitor ridership numbers in real-time provides an important means for passengers to make informed journey decisions during the pandemic, which ties in perfectly with our mission to make public transport a safer and more attractive option.”