Acceptance of Products and Plant

Network Rail standard NR/CS/ACC/029 mandates the process for the acceptance of new or modified products and change of application of, materials, equipment, and systems; Road Rail Vehicles/attachments and Rail Mounted Maintenance Machines, On-Track Machines, road plant and Portable and Transportable Work Equipment that could effect or interact with the infrastructure.

The guide to product acceptance has been developed to assist applicants seeking Network Rail acceptance of manufactured items described above for use in or on the Network Rail controlled infrastructure. To register a proposal for acceptance a proposal form needs to be completed (refer to the guidance document) and forwarded to Acceptance Services.


The Acceptance Services objective is to provide the company with a means of fulfilling infrastructure manager (IM) obligations through controlled infrastructure configuration control. The IM must control the

• Safety of the line 
• Safe Inter-working of trains

In addition Acceptance ensures that business objectives are obtained through an assessment process that considers 

•  Safety assurance 
• Asset protection 
•  Fitness for purpose 
•  Supply diversity

This is carried out through the acceptance process administered by the Acceptance Services which consists of assessments by engineers and peer review panels [System Review Panels (SRP) and Network Rail Acceptance Panel (NRAP)].

Identifying Accepted Products

Users of equipment on the controlled infrastructure shall only use ACCEPTED equipment. Network Rail safety documentation specifies that users use the Parts And Drawings System (PADS) as the catalogue of approved parts. The link to the web based PADS site is http://www.raildata.co.uk

Contact details are given in the guidance document.