ABSTRACT. A new concept for railway autonomous inspection and repair is being developed for the UK’s national railway. The new system aims at reducing human interventions at highly hazardous locations such as tunnels; while simultaneously inspecting and repairing rail components autonomously. It is envisioned that the new system will be deployed using a robotic arm mounted on a road-rail vehicle. Different routes for verification and validation at different levels are being evaluated. In the first level, the new system concept design will be validated by breaking it down into sublevel components and individually assessing integration, interfacing and structure. A second level will use a “digital twin” approach to simulate appropriate outputs for the tests, e.g. simple i/o for sub-systems and if appropriate, extended work into three-dimensional views. Finally a third lower level will validate and verify the inspection capability and its robotic arm interfacing. This will use a combination of modelled data and part inspection measurements.