BLOGS
2 May Crossrail aims to bridge gender gap
One of the main aims of our charity UKRITT is to get the next generation of schoolchildren, be they boy or girl, interested in forging a career in the rail industry.
So, the announcement of Crossrail’s new competition to bridge the gender divide in the engineering and construction industries has been welcomed by us all at RTM.
Crossrail wants young women aged 16 to 19 to come up with innovative and compelling ways to attract more women to the industry. While almost a third of jobs at Crossrail Ltd are filled by women – compared to just 20% of job roles across the UK construction industry – the project wants to explore ways to leave a lasting legacy.
From the entries, 30 will be selected to take part in a skills training and speed-networking session with some of the UK’s leading engineers and a Crossrail tour.
The top five will also get a mentor for a year to provide virtual support and advice. The winners’ day takes place on National Women in Engineering Day on Monday 23 June 2014 at Crossrail’s Canary Wharf offices.
Any budding female Brunels out there best get their ideas in fast, as the challenge closes on Friday 23 May 2014. Best of luck to everyone who gets involved. Visit www.
mykindacrowd.com/Challenges/ engineer-your-future
11 April
Thoughts from the DDRF’s 2014 conference
The annual DDRF conference is not a gigantic event in pure attendance numbers, but it is always an interesting one, with a
reputation for attracting top-class speakers. It’s rare to see a line-up as stellar as that we saw at yesterday’s event, and they all had something genuinely worthwhile to say.
The DfT can sometimes seem arcane and a law unto itself, but Clare Moriarty seemed purposeful in her desire to make it ‘part of the rail industry’, not just part of the civil service bureaucracy. There has been a big reorganisation since the West Coast franchising debacle, with more to come. Whether Moriarty can really succeed in making the industry think kindly on the DfT remains to be seen – on both franchising and rolling stock procurement it’s not for nothing it’s known by many as ‘DafT’. But it does seem to know what it needs to do to change.
Rail journalists had heard many of McLoughlin’s main points before – record investment,
growing
railway, need for HS2, etc – but his delight (and relief) at Bombardier having won the Crossrail rolling stock contract was clear.
Michael Roberts, too, was
rehearsing some old hits, and had a tough job selling the RDG to a slightly sceptical industry. He provoked mirth when he said that in an EU survey of passenger views on the quality of their railways, the UK had “come top – but for Finland”. Rather than accepting this as second place, Roberts noted the small scale of the Scandinavian country’s rail sector, as if it somehow didn’t really count.
Martin Griffiths, while making jokey references to the reputation of his boss and friend Brian Souter, was an entertaining speaker in his own right, gleefully joshing Network Rail’s Patrick Butcher about the company’s alleged tightness when it comes to letting the money flow, before going off on a tangent about what Derby County legend Brian Clough
18 | rail technology magazine Apr/May 14
might have thought about Scottish independence.
Maggie Simpson of the Rail Freight Group was punchy as ever, noting freight’s growth but not being shy about the factors holding back further success. She had no problem blaming Network Rail for
delays, but did welcome the scale of investment in CP5 to upgrade the freight network. She also made the case powerfully for Women in Rail, an organisation RTM has always been proud to support.
(Full coverage from the event on page 26)
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