The Open Innovation Series / #4 — Brunel, the Great Railway Revolution and the Future of Assessment

What Britain’s railway pioneers can teach us about innovation, interconnected systems and the importance of getting the journey right.

I’ve always found something rather fascinating about the history of Britain’s railways. Not simply the great steam locomotives, the magnificent Victorian stations or the extraordinary bridges and tunnels that still form part of our railway network today, but the sheer ambition of the people who created them.

And perhaps nobody embodied that ambition more than Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Here was a man who wasn’t particularly interested in doing things the conventional way. He wanted to challenge established thinking, push engineering boundaries and create something that hadn’t existed before.

In many respects, Brunel was practising what we would now describe as open innovation, although I suspect he would have had little patience for the terminology.

What interests me most, however, is that the real railway revolution wasn’t simply about inventing a better locomotive. It was about creating an entirely new way of connecting people, places and processes.

And I think there are some remarkably interesting parallels with the way we should be thinking about the future of digital assessment.

A railway built around a vision

In the 1830s, Britain was already experiencing the extraordinary changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

Factories were expanding, cities were growing and the movement of people and goods was becoming increasingly important.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830, had demonstrated the enormous potential of steam-powered passenger and freight transport.

But the railway network was still in its infancy.

Different companies were building their own lines, often with different engineering approaches and operating arrangements. There was no single, coordinated national railway system.

Enter Brunel.

Appointed engineer of the Great Western Railway in 1833, he set about creating a route between London and Bristol that would become one of the greatest engineering achievements of the nineteenth century.

What I find particularly interesting is that Brunel didn’t simply look at the locomotive. He considered the entire railway.

The alignment of the tracks, the gradients, the bridges, the tunnels, the stations and the experience of the passenger were all part of his thinking.

He wanted trains to travel faster, more smoothly and more comfortably than many believed possible.

And he was prepared to redesign almost everything to achieve it.

The curious question of seven feet and a quarter of an inch

One of the most intriguing aspects of Brunel’s work was his determination to use a wider railway track.

While George Stephenson’s railway gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches was becoming increasingly established, Brunel championed a broad gauge of 7 feet and ¼ inch.

That difference might sound rather trivial today.

After all, we’re talking about the distance between two pieces of railway track.

But to Brunel, it was fundamental.

A wider track offered the potential for greater stability, larger locomotives, improved passenger comfort and higher speeds.

He wasn’t simply trying to improve an existing railway. He was questioning whether the fundamental design assumptions were right in the first place.

I rather admire that thinking.

Unfortunately, it also created a problem.

As Britain’s railways expanded, Brunel’s broad-gauge network increasingly encountered lines built to Stephenson’s narrower gauge.

And the trains couldn’t simply continue their journeys.

Passengers had to change trains. Goods had to be unloaded and transferred. What should have been a continuous journey became a collection of separate activities.

The difficulties were particularly evident at places such as Gloucester, where different railway systems met.

Eventually, Parliament intervened with the Railway Gauge Act of 1846, establishing 4 feet 8½ inches as the standard for new passenger railways in Great Britain, subject to exceptions.

Brunel’s broad gauge survived for decades, but the Great Western Railway finally abandoned it in 1892.

There’s a wonderful lesson here.

You can have an exceptionally well-engineered system, but if it cannot connect effectively with everything around it, much of its potential is lost.

And isn’t that remarkably similar to some of the challenges we face in technology today?

The railway was much more than the track

Of course, laying hundreds of miles of railway track was only one part of the challenge.

Think about what actually had to happen for a Victorian train to travel successfully from London to Bristol.

The track needed to be properly aligned. Bridges had to support enormous loads. Tunnels had to be excavated with extraordinary precision. Stations needed to accommodate passengers and freight.

And as more trains began using the same infrastructure, the complexity increased.

How could one train safely follow another?

Who decided when a train could enter a particular section of track?

What happened when two services needed to use the same junction?

How did railway staff communicate delays, changes and potential hazards?

These weren’t minor administrative questions. They were fundamental to making the entire network work.

Early railway operations relied heavily on timetables, human judgement and relatively basic signalling arrangements.

As traffic increased, more sophisticated systems emerged, including telegraph communications, block signalling and mechanical interlocking.

The principle behind block signalling was particularly important. A railway line could be divided into sections, with controls designed to prevent conflicting train movements.

Interlocking then helped ensure that points and signals were set in compatible positions before a train was allowed to proceed.

What had started as a relatively straightforward means of moving a locomotive along a track was becoming an increasingly sophisticated system of coordinated activities.

In modern language, we might call much of this workflow management.

Brunel’s tunnels and the importance of precision

One of my favourite examples of Brunel’s extraordinary ambition is Box Tunnel, between Chippenham and Bath.

Construction began in 1836, and the tunnel, nearly two miles long, was considered by some to be an almost impossible undertaking.

Without modern tunnel-boring machinery, engineers and thousands of workers had to excavate through difficult geological conditions.

The work progressed from both ends, with shafts providing additional access.

When the two excavations finally met in 1841, the alignment was reportedly less than two inches out.

Think about that for a moment.

Nearly two miles of tunnel, excavated through a hillside using nineteenth-century surveying and engineering techniques, meeting with that degree of accuracy.

It’s extraordinary.

But it also demonstrates something important about complex systems.

Every individual activity had to contribute to the final objective. Surveying, excavation, drainage, materials, labour and construction all needed to be coordinated.

A failure in one part could delay the entire railway.

Indeed, Box Tunnel was one of the principal reasons the complete London-to-Bristol route did not open until June 1841.

The lesson isn’t simply about engineering precision. It’s about understanding the dependencies between activities.

And that brings me to assessment.

From railway signalling to assessment workflows

If we look at a modern assessment organisation, there are some striking similarities.

An assessment doesn’t begin when somebody sits an examination, nor does it necessarily end when a mark is awarded.

There is an entire journey.

Learners need to be registered. Eligibility may need to be confirmed. Assessments must be scheduled. Evidence needs to be collected. Marking and moderation must take place. Quality assurance requirements must be satisfied before results and certification can be released.

In many organisations, these activities are still coordinated through a combination of software platforms, spreadsheets, emails and human intervention.

Individual systems may perform their particular tasks extremely well.

But what happens between those systems?

Who knows when an assessment is ready for verification?

What triggers the next activity?

How are exceptions handled?

Can an awarding organisation see precisely where an assessment sits within the overall process?

And, perhaps most importantly, how much unnecessary administration is created simply because information isn’t moving automatically from one stage to another?

This is where I believe workflow automation becomes particularly interesting.

Rather than treating an examination as an isolated digital event, we can begin to think about the entire assessment lifecycle as a connected sequence of activities.

A completed assessment might automatically move to marking. A marking decision could trigger moderation or internal verification. An exception might be routed to an appropriate specialist, while a successful verification could initiate the next stage of certification.

Of course, not every process should be automated, and professional judgement remains essential.

But the principle is remarkably similar to the development of railway signalling.

The system understands what has happened, what needs to happen next and what conditions must be satisfied before the journey can continue.

When different railway lines finally connected

There’s another aspect of railway history that I find particularly relevant.

The early railway companies were understandably focused on developing their own networks.

They had invested enormous amounts of money in their infrastructure and naturally wanted to protect their commercial interests.

Yet the real economic transformation came as those individual lines became increasingly interconnected.

A railway between two towns was useful.

A railway connecting dozens of towns was considerably more valuable.

A national network capable of moving people and goods across the country was something else entirely.

The same thinking should apply to assessment technology.

An assessment platform shouldn’t necessarily exist as an isolated destination.

It should be capable of connecting with learning management systems, awarding organisation databases, employer systems, digital credential services and other specialist technologies.

This is where open APIs, common data standards and interoperability become so important.

The objective isn’t to force every organisation to use identical technology.

It’s to allow different technologies to work together.

In effect, we need to avoid creating the digital equivalent of Brunel’s break of gauge.

Innovation also means being prepared to fail

It’s tempting to look back at Brunel as somebody who always got things right.

He didn’t.

One particularly fascinating example was his involvement with the atmospheric railway in South Devon.

Instead of relying on conventional steam locomotives, the system used atmospheric pressure to propel trains along the railway.

The concept was ingenious.

Stationary pumping engines created a vacuum in a pipe running between the rails, moving a piston connected to the train.

Brunel recognised the potential and supported its adoption.

Unfortunately, maintaining the seals along the pipe proved extremely difficult. Reliability and operating costs became serious problems, and the system was abandoned in 1848.

It was an expensive failure.

But it also reminds us that innovation rarely follows a perfectly straight line.

Some ideas succeed. Others fail. Occasionally, the underlying concept is sound, but the technology needed to support it isn’t sufficiently mature.

The important thing is to experiment, learn and remain prepared to challenge assumptions.

That’s as relevant to artificial intelligence and assessment automation today as it was to railway engineering nearly two centuries ago.

The next great railway journey

When I look at the assessment sector today, I see an industry that has already made enormous technological progress.

Online examinations, remote invigilation, automated marking and digital certification have all helped change the way assessments are delivered.

But I also wonder whether we’re still concentrating too much on the locomotive rather than the railway.

We continue to develop increasingly sophisticated individual features, yet the greatest opportunities may lie in connecting them.

Could we create assessment environments where information moves intelligently between organisations?

Could workflow automation remove unnecessary administrative delays?

Could greater interoperability allow awarding organisations, training providers and employers to collaborate more effectively?

And could artificial intelligence help identify bottlenecks, anticipate problems and support better decisions across the entire assessment journey?

These are the questions I find particularly exciting.

Not because technology should replace people, but because well-designed systems should allow people to concentrate on the work that genuinely requires their knowledge, expertise and judgement.

Brunel understood that a great railway was much more than a powerful locomotive.

It was an entire system, designed with extraordinary ambition, in which countless individual components contributed to a much greater purpose.

Nearly two hundred years later, perhaps the assessment sector has reached a similar moment.

We’ve spent years developing better digital locomotives. Perhaps it’s time we concentrated on building the railway.

 

The Open Innovation Series
#4 — Brunel, the Great Railway Revolution and the Future of Assessment

Jonathan Franklin at Coelrind, builders of XAMS, a regulated online assessment platform serving awarding bodies across the UK and Ireland.