Training trip

This learning activity was designed as a didactic experience in which the students took on an active and decisive role, facing the task of making decisions relevant to the project. The main objective was clear: to design and validate field sheets that would make it possible to characterise and evaluate the state of conservation of low-traffic railway lines within the TOUR&RAIL project.

The activity was structured in three phases. In the first, which took place in the classroom, the Design Thinking methodology was used to simulate expert working groups. The students, organised in groups, proposed the structure and content of various field sheets. The teaching team compiled these proposals and consolidated them into two definitive sheets: one for the evaluation of stations and the other for the evaluation of railway infrastructure.
The second phase consisted of validating these files in the field, carried out on the Madrid-Burgos line. This practical work was carried out in a collaborative environment that included an international team of professors and scholarship students from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and the French university Gustave Eiffel, as well as a representative of the International Union of Railways. During this stage, improvements were identified and adjustments were made to the files, thus obtaining the final versions that were later used for the recognition and control activities of the project’s railway lines.

Finally, the third phase focused on the presentation of the results by the scholarship students in the classroom, closing the cycle of this collaborative experience. This approach allowed for the combination of theoretical knowledge acquisition with practical application, offering participants an enriching learning experience aligned with the project’s objectives.