TRAINING
Above: One of the models made by students at a Smallpeice Trust rail engineering course at the University of Birmingham in 2011.
“They are going to be a very significant part of our future transport arrangements and they will inevitably need to become more innovative.”
Stansfeld noted that systems approaches are taking hold elsewhere in the industry, for example via Network Rail’s shift to ‘alliancing’ with operators, most notably South West Trains.
The role of NSARE
Stansfeld sits on the board of NSARE, which has a “very important role” in all of this, he said.
“NSARE is taking a lead in the industry in putting in place common approaches, common qualification schemes, common recognition of qualifications and competences – all of that movement is absolutely in the right direction.
RTM asked Stansfeld whether tackling over- specialisation among engineers could have the unintended consequence of making it easier for some engineers to move away from rail.
He said: “There will always be some people who will want to move around and I think that’s a good thing, because you get transfer of know-how, cross-learning from different industries and so on, and that’s very positive. I wouldn’t want to try to do anything to stop that.
“But at the same time, I don’t think the respondents to the survey are advocating that everybody should be a generalist. I think really what they’re saying is that there are two lots of engineers: the people who are well-rounded generalists who are maybe going to be the senior managers and leaders in the industry in the future and need to have a broad understanding of how it works, then the technical specialists who need to be able to get a broad understanding of how the railway system works rather than simply being just funnelled in one direction, or having a single diet. I wouldn’t be worried about engineers going off to other industries: I think that’s very positive, and hopefully the rail industry will be able to accept engineers coming back in the other direction.”
Standards and interoperability
The Lloyd’s Register Group – credited by the Guardian newspaper
“Having accredited training providers will help us get from here to where we need to be: all the building blocks are there, and because NSARE represents the industry – it’s got the infrastructure operators, train operating companies, freight, consultants – that’s why there’s been so much support. People recognise at last that ‘here’s a body that’s actually doing something’.”
Recruitment and retention
He said: “Any country you look at has its own particular way of doing things and although there is a European initiative, of course, to try to arrive at a common way of doing things, via the directives and so forth, there’s still a very heavy national component that comes into play.
“If you really want to reduce costs in the industry, and you want genuinely common standards where things are completely interoperable, you don’t want to redesign a component every time you run it on a different piece of railway. That’s a challenge. We need products genuinely certified in one country to be acceptable in another.
“We are interested in trying to work towards common approaches to assurance. We are an organisation that is essentially about engineering and technology. We have nothing to sell apart from the skills and know-how of our people and therefore we are very interested in ensuring there’s a ready supply of people for the future, and that they are well-rounded. The services we provide to the industry are assurance and technical expert advice, so we employ quite a wide range of engineers here, but the people who are really most useful are those with broad experience in a number of different areas: people who can take a systems view and also deal with the interfaces between different systems,because that’s where problems occur. We are interested in doing what we can to advance the education of future engineers.”
John Stansfeld
FOR MORE INFORMATION
www.lr.org
rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 12 | 25
recently as being a “very British success story”, as well as a model of corporate responsibility – is ultimately concerned with standards, assurance, risk management and processes. It is no wonder, therefore, that it has found plenty of work in the rail industry.
Stansfeld said a key challenge for the industry was allowing more cross-border traffic via standardisation and interoperability.
Image: Network Rail
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