GEN Y RAIL
The teams that made it through to the fi nal from the event
were 3 Amigos
and Team 13 from William Brookes Academy; ‘The Future’ from Sandwell College; and 4 Lions from City College Coventry in the over-16s category. Team Bruce Wayne from Adcote School For Girls made it through in the Under-16s segment.
Team Bruce Wayne, who tried to get trending on Twitter during their efforts in
the national couldn’t fi nal, believe said they they’d made
it through after competing against so many “top quality opponents”.
As well as reaching the fi nal, all the students received the British Science Association’s CREST Discovery award.
David Ward, the association’s director of partnerships, said that promoting STEM to as many young people is vital in encouraging and stimulating their creativity.
During the day at Westwood, Rhianne Cakebread, project manager at Network Rail, talked about her ‘amazing’ adventure through Network Rail’s advanced apprenticeship programme. She was among those to appear in the company’s publicity photos promoting its apprenticeship scheme back in 2010, as a signalling and telecoms apprentice at Basingstoke.
She told RTM: “What is so good about the scheme is that you get trained, get your qualifi cations, get paid in your fi nal year, and at the end of it you are guaranteed a job.
“Honestly, I can’t think of a better industry to be working in.”
Tim Priestley, project manager in the central electrifi cation team at Network Rail, added that Gen Y is great because it gets the students working on really complex challenges.
He added: “From my experience of working in rail for the last four years, I can’t imagine working anywhere else. It wasn’t presented to me early on as a career option, but if these events had been around it would’ve helped me make my decision earlier.
“Gen Y Rail can only help encourage people to take advantage of this huge industry that has gone under the radar historically.”
Bill Templeton,
Network Rail’s education programme manager,
said he extremely proud of was all the
students and how they tackled the
challenges. He added that
Network Rail was also happy to be helping promote the “vibrancy” of the rail industry through supporting Gen Y Rail.
The challenge
The actual concept of designing a ‘futuristic’ train in the Gen Y Rail events had its genesis at the Rail Education Group at NewRail at Newcastle University. Its manager, Dr Marin Marinov, told RTM he wanted to help create a challenge that was reasonably simple, but also entertaining for the age group.
“The students did well and followed the objectives, showing their creativity. Their creative thinking was provoked and they demonstrated they are capable of thinking out of the box,” he said. “I genuinely believe we should keep running the Gen Y events, and it should become a tradition, because it is very important to secure this exposure at the early stage.”
His research assistant Anna Fraszczyk, a STEM ambassador, added that it was amazing to see the response from schools, which were really positive and interested.
She added: “It’s a great idea to have the event rolled out across the country, and we really want to see it continued into next year and beyond – perhaps with a slightly different challenge. We are really positive about it.”
The north east played host to the fi rst Gen Y Rail regional heat back in February – there was coverage in RTM’s February/March 2014 edition.
rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 14 | 21
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