Coventry’s pioneering Very Light Rail project is reimagining urban transport with a novel shallow trackform and smaller autonomous rail-based vehicles. This lecture will introduce the origins and rationale behind the programme, outline the engineering and research that underpin the modular design, and share lessons learned from recent testing and installation works. It will also explore the future development pathway for the Coventry demonstrator route, and the wider opportunities the VLR concept could unlock through the deployment of smaller autonomous rail-based vehicles in UK cities.
It will be presented by Dr Christopher Micallef, Track Systems Programme Lead for the Coventry Very Light Rail project. A Chartered Engineer with an engineering doctorate in system design and optimisation, he brings over two decades of experience delivering complex infrastructure and innovation projects across diverse transport and manufacturing sectors.