Meanwhile, in Wolverhampton, Network Rail is also trialling a ‘digital tethering’ system to allow for BVLOS drone operations in areas with poor GPS coverage. The system effectively forces drones to fly within a defined ‘safety corridor’ to ensure safe flight behaviour by combining artificial perception with accurate ground-based beacons.
It also provides real-time data on the drones’ position, even in areas where GPS signals are unreliable, such as remote or dense areas of the railway.
Network Rail hopes the trials will convince the CAA to roll the systems out more broadly to improve maintenance response times.
Programme manager for national drone strategy Dominic Mottram said: “The potential for these projects to deliver a more reliable, safer railway for our passengers and colleagues is huge and could even be a game-changer.
“We operate one of the safest railways in the world, but it is also one of the busiest, so keeping trains running reliably while monitoring tracks and dealing with incidents can be a challenge, and delays can spread quickly and far from the original source. Information provided by drones will mean our colleagues’ expertise in maintaining the railway can be focused where it is needed, without exposing them to the risk of the ‘live railway’, and instances of trespass can be tackled much more quickly.”
Jan Domaradzki, CEO of Dronecloud, said: “Dronecloud’s vision is to deploy multiple hubs with satellite drone ports to deliver a common capability for all asset managers and drone operators needing to fly BVLOS across the UK. This will be a truly game-changing capability, opening the door for centralised mass-scale deployment of drones across all critical national infrastructure.”
In February, [Vodafone launched trials](https://eandt.theiet.org/2025/02/20/vodafone-trialling-drones-can-remotely-repair-network-outages) that would see drones being used to create a wireless link between mobile network masts when an underground cable is severed.