IMechE Railway Division Chair’s address 2024

Iain Rae is the Railway Division (RD) chair for 2024/25. He started his traditional tour of RD Centres in Swindon in early September, a long way from his home in Scotland. He is the fifty-sixth chair and his theme is about diversity, inclusion and the skills gap in the industry, caused, among other things, by the pause in graduate recruitment during the first years of rail privatisation. Iain’s day job is strategy and sustainability director at Brodie Engineering, based in Kilmarnock. In this role he is developing the company’s business strategy, as well as leading Brodie’s new consulting business.

Like many RD chairs, Iain started as a BR sponsored student in 1989, completing a BEng in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering (First Class Honours) at the University of Strathclyde, having 18 months of placements around all the engineering section and “meeting fantastic future colleagues”. During that time, he was given the task of fitting luggage racks to Class 156 DMUs which are still in place today. His first appointment in 1994 was as warranty and audit engineer at Haymarket depot, followed by his first big project managing the full refurbishment of Class 158 interiors (first and standard class accommodation as well as toilets).

“Initially I was disappointed not to do engineering,” he said, “but these projects gave me the foundations of project management – making things happen, deadlines are deadlines, fire safety, standards. And it’s all about the customer.”

Onward and upward

In 1997, Iain became Springburn Depot’s first professional engineer, as senior works design engineer covering accident damage repairs and failure investigation. He was part of a wheelset review team focusing on reducing risk to the railway arising from faults in wheelset overhaul. He was later promoted to engineering manager, saying: “On top of my engineering role, I was given the task of developing the accident damage repair business for Springburn and Wolverton, including marketing, best practise, and welding standards”.

In 2005, he was promoted to general manager of the Springburn business (which, with Wolverton, was then owned by Alstom). He was accountable for everything that goes wrong, quality, safety, cash flow, and profit (or loss!). He said: “As a team, we turned the business from loss to profit, with a simple focus on doing things right first time”, adding that working with and getting the best of people was his key learning.

In 2007, Iain joined Interfleet Technology first as principal consultant and then as operations development director for Scotland, leading and supporting many Scottish projects including the new sleeper introduction. Readers might remember that the introduction of the Hitachi Class 385 trains was delayed and a decision was made to draft in some redundant ex-Great Northern Class 365s in a hurry. Despite the new trains’ delay, the DMUs they were replacing were due to go to other operators, so the work had to be started from scratch and completed in 20 weeks.

Iain said he led that project “single handed, literally … as I broke my arm three days before the project started”. He used this as an opportunity to involve a young engineer as a sort of executive assistant, something that benefitted both the young engineer and Iain himself. “Now I take a younger engineer with me into all big projects”, said Iain, remarking on the mutual benefit.

He was also client project manager for the Scottish hydrogen train which was demonstrated at COP26. It is a Class 314 converted to run on hydrogen with re-generated braking energy fed into the battery pack, and an on-site hydrogen generator or, as Iain put it: “Using yesterday’s wind to power today’s trains.”

Iain’s role at Brodie Engineering is to develop the medium/long term strategy for the business with a focus on increasing turnover and business success through building partnerships and working collaboratively with customers; entering new markets in decarbonisation refurbishment, including HydroFLEX, Express Freight and class 769 bi-modes; and investigating reinstating Kilmarnock’s bogie and wheelset overhauls business, as well as the consultancy business previously mentioned. He now works for Gerry Hilferty who, many years ago was Iain’s first hire, reminding everyone that you should treat all people well as the day might come when they’re your boss!

Lessons learned

Iain has been active in the IMechE for many years, especially in the RD’s Scottish Centre before becoming a vice chair of the Institutions Railway Division Board.

Iain summarised lessons from his career to date:

• Volunteering is a great way to learn, and enjoyable.
• Use the IMechE’s Monitored Professional Development Scheme and work with your mentor to seize development opportunities.
• Remember that it’s all about the customer – or your customer.
• It’s all about the engineering too.
• When the time is right, stretch yourself, (does not necessarily need to be a new job).
• Process and procedures are great foundations but it’s people and teams that make things happen.
• When teams have a common goal, so much more is possible.
• Remember to put back what you took out.

Chair’s objectives

Iain presented statistics from the National Skills Academy for Rail, and the IMechE, pointing to a number of strategic people factors affecting rail. First, the gender balance is poor. Men represent over 85% to 90% of the rail engineering sector, a little worse than general engineering although it is improving over time. Second, a bigger proportion of the workforce is in the last third of its working life than the first third. Third, at age 41-45 where the population would normally be at its peak, the proportion is slightly depressed, probably as a result of recruitment and graduate training policies in the first years after rail privatisation.

Ethnic diversity is quite low amongst older engineers, possibly reflecting the population mix at the time when people were choosing careers. Further, a RD survey analysis shows around 30% non-white British amongst the younger age groups although the result needs to be treated with caution as 40% – 50% did not declare their ethnicity.

Iain said that he would embrace objective three of the IMechE’s strategy to “build inclusive, thriving communities to support technicians and engineers to learn, work, and excel,” noting the NSAR’s comment that “filling rail workforce gaps has the potential to generate an additional £641 million for the UK economy”.

Needless to say, as leader of the RD, Iain can only discharge this objective through the membership. His presentation was a clear statement of intent with much audience participation illustrating, for example, how metal fatigue can easily break a metal rod (paper clips ultimate tensile strain of 1.1kN). He intends to champion the RD’s Annual Technical Tour (ATT) and Railway Challenge and, in his presentation, he invited young participants to speak about their experiences in those events. In Swindon it was Jack Evans and Jonathan Tomkins from GWR and members of Siemens’ Railway Challenge team.

It was notable that the young engineers talked about their nervousness about being so close to so many ‘senior engineers’ at the ATT only to discover that they were a) friendly, b) equally prepared to learn, and c) equally prepared to ask what appeared to be obvious questions only to receive unexpected answers.

Superheroes

Iain celebrated the ‘superpowers’ that engineers possess: they can look at the shape of an axle end, for example, and see where there might be stress concentrations, or can read a complex pneumatic brake diagram, and then be able to explain these to lay people who might be affected by the engineer’s decisions. In the context of all this Iain was convinced, with perhaps slight exaggeration, that a good engineer has super strength and X-ray vision, can harness nature, and lead people whilst having fun on the way!

As outlined above he sees that focusing on youth is the way to diversity of thought, more inclusion, and encouraging more women into a male-dominated world. Indeed, much of the discussion was about how this might be accomplished. He promoted getting involved in the Primary Engineer, Secondary Engineer, and other initiatives to encourage youngsters. He also described the IMechE’s involvement with the BBC Bitesize Schools Tour project.

Iain finished with the following challenges to the audience:

• Help develop our engineers.
• You are brilliant people – please shine.
• Be kind and look after yourself.
• If you’re in a position of influence, think about how you can help develop our future of rail engineering leaders.
• Younger engineers – keep developing.
• Ask to be at the table.
• Get involved with the IMechE.

Finally, Iain used a quote attributed to the late HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh: “Engineers are second only to God. Everything He didn’t create has been invented by engineers”. But, Iain added, “don’t take this too literally!”

Brodie Engineering

Brodie Engineering operates from two depots in Kilmarnock, Scotland and also provides a mobile service to the rail industry over the length and breadth of the UK and Ireland. It offers a wide range of refurbishment, maintenance, overhaul, engineering support, project management, and repair services to the UK rail and light rail sector.

Its engineering team undertakes design and development work as well as reverse engineering for obsolete components/systems and developing new equipment and materials.

Image credit: Malcolm Dobell