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Lots of people want to work in the rail industry and York graduate Laura has made it happen. She is Technical Head of System Safety at Network Rail, which means it’s her job to make sure the railways are safe. Get an insight into what’s going on in the sector and what this kind of work is actually like.

Laura’s bio:

I gained a Masters of Engineering at the University of York before starting my career in the rail industry. Over the last fifteen years I have been part of the modernisation of the industry, varying from insourcing of circa 500 staff to the safe integration of new railway stations. In my personal life I am a mother to four children and a school foundation governor.

Useful links:

• Network Rail Careers
• Women in Engineering
• Women into Science and Engineering (WISE)
• Environment and energy job sector
• Engineering and manufacturing careers
• Jobs and internships in Electronics, Energy, Engineering and more!

Transcript:

Kate: 

You’re listening to the ‘What Do You Actually Do?’ podcast. Each week we want to bring you an inspiring interview, a useful tip or encouraging message to help you find your place in the professional world. 

Hello and welcome to this episode of ‘What Do You Actually Do?’. My name is Kate Morris, and I’ll be your host today. In today’s episode we’ll be talking about working in electronic engineering within the railway industry. Today we’re joined by Laura Bolton, who is Technical Head of System Safety at Network Rail. So, Laura, that’s a very serious sounding job, what do you actually do? 

Laura: 

It’s a good question. So I work across many regions and definitely different routes across the whole of Network Rail, ensuring that the projects that we are installing are done safely – and that’s not just for the workers who are installing it, but also for the passengers and the people using the trains – that what we’ve installed isn’t going to create any additional risks into their travel or into their work day.

Kate:

So, it’s a Technical Head of System Safety, so does that mean it’s kind of digital? Like, making sure that trains are leaving and arriving at the right times and not crashing into each other? Or is it to do with the actual platforms and infrastructure? What does it really involve?

Laura: 

So, it’s more about ensuring that we’re complying with legislation. So, the railway has its own set of legislation and – I’m going to really try and not get too technical on this – but we’ve got something called CSMRA, which is for the rail industry, which is the common safety method, risk evaluation and assessment that we do. And it is mainly about ensuring the, as I said earlier, I guess that what we’re doing isn’t importing any risk. So, it is the long-term effects of the project, so normally we talk about CDM, which is very much based more on, let’s say, the construction and making sure that we’re constructing things safely and designing things safely. But CSM looks a little bit further afield, looking at the whole system, so not ‘I’m just building a platform’, but how does this platform actually affect the network and the activities that are required around it, and how can we make sure that what we’re doing is safe. 

Kate: 

So, if that’s the sort of goal of the job then, what does a typical day look like? What sort of tasks are you doing? 

Laura: 

So, if we take today, for example, in some ways it’s been a little bit boring, in the sense that I’ve reading legislation. And I’m looking at how we can challenge legislation, or not legislation, how we can challenge Network Rail standards to make it more efficient, and quicker and safer, so that we’re getting to the point in the delivery quicker, but also at the same time not cutting corners, which is also very important, because I know there’s a lot of standards and legislation where people go – ‘Well, it’ll be quicker if we just do something else’, which, if you think back in 1986 with the Challenger accident, that was pretty much based on people cutting an awful lot of corners and not realising what the potential impact could be by doing that. 

Kate: 

So, it’s really kind of, I guess, making sure everything’s done for a reason. And I’m imagining, maybe I’m wrong, but I imagine there may be tricky conversations then, if you’ve got some people who are advocating more for budgets and saving as much money as possible, some people advocating for speed and getting it done as quickly, but also having to think about the bigger picture and why it’s important to follow those standards. 

Laura: 

And I think that’s it. And unfortunately, when you get to the joys of heads of positions, you are looking a little bit more at procedures and processes, and you don’t get into the nitty gritty. So it’s obviously the project teams that are actually doing the delivery, but they’re getting into the nitty gritty of, you know, how we’re going to design it, what are the design restraints and what areas do we need to look at. Whereas, by the time you’re getting to myself, I’m checking that you have looked at those potential areas that aren’t as obvious. So, if you’re a telecoms engineer, which is where my background is, I can talk very much about our GSMR, which is your 2G technology back in the day when you could only do text messaging and telephone calls, which is what we still use in the railway. But have you actually thought about how we are going to get people to the GSMR site safely? Have you thought about that, or have you just thought about the end goal of getting the information from the ground or the signal box across to the train driver. 

Kate: 

So are you kind of mainly office-based, or do you go out and about to inspect different works? How does that side of things work? 

Laura: 

Generally I’m office bound, which I think has been increased due to the luxury of COVID that we’ve all gone through recently. But yeah, no, I do sometimes go out and look at the stations and give feedback on what we could do to improve it. So, stations is probably one of my areas that I’ve specialised in as well, which is how do we ensure that we’re compliant with the interoperability regulations from Europe, because although we’ve left the EU, we have still decided to adopt all of the interoperability standards from Europe, and we’re still making sure that we comply with them. And for stations, it’s very important that we think of all of our users and not just, let’s say, the commuter traffic, but also people who – PRM is the standard, which is persons with reduced ability. So, whether that’s because they are wheelchair users, or whether they’ve got visual impairment, or hearing, or anything really, it’s just making sure that we give everybody the experience we’d like them to have, and access. 

Kate: 

So, you mentioned things were a bit different before COVID then, so how did the pandemic impact on your particular work? 

Laura: 

I was in a different role pre-pandemic, so I’ve only moved into this role fairly recently. So before then I was actually a system engineer working in projects. So my project which was – well one of my projects which was – Stevenage Platform 5, which is a brand new platform, if anybody wants to go and have a look at it. Which is for the compliance standards. And what I was doing there was going to site and making sure that things were installed correctly, or questioning the designs as I was doing project engineering as well. So, looking at the designs that were created by our contractors, checking that they were compliant, again, to standards, but also that they were safe and we’ve thought about if it could be maintained, who would be maintaining it and making sure that they were getting the right information. So, it’s very much an assurance role, I suppose, that I’m in, as I mentioned. 

Kate: 

And you did an integrated Masters degree in Electronics with Communications Engineering. How did doing this degree impact on your career? Because you’re saying you sort of used to be doing more actual technical roles, you’ve done project roles. So yeah, how did this Masters impact on things?

Laura: 

It’s a good question. So I did a straight Masters, so it wasn’t like I did a Bachelors and then came and did a Masters – I did a straight Masters degree. If I hadn’t had done that Masters degree, I wouldn’t have been able to work in Network Rail, or if I hadn’t done an Engineering degree, I wouldn’t have been able to work in Network Rail, because I have joined under the Engineering graduate scheme, and one of the requirements is that it was an approved degree via the IET, which is the body that I’m a member of, with the plan of me becoming a chartered engineer, which obviously starts with having a degree, at least for the route I’m taking. So, it definitely started from that, but I’m definitely more into, let’s say, your management area of engineering than obviously the nitty gritty of electronics – I say nitty gritty, it doesn’t feel correct really for electronics to think about it like that – as opposed to the designing in detail. I’m more in the ‘take what’s being designed and install it in a manner that is beneficial’, for the rail environment, in this scenario. 

Kate: 

Was that a conscious choice, or was it that your qualifications led you in that direction? Or could you have gone either way, dependent on your preference? 

Laura: 

It’s definitely preference of whether you want it to be more into, let’s say, the innovation from a design perspective, or whether you want to go into that more management, I guess, area. I think one of the great things about engineering, anyway, is it opens your doors to the engineering itself, but also that kind of lateral thinking and processing which I do think is really, really important in probably any job, but definitely in the railways, that you can look at what are the options, what are the solutions. We definitely get accused in the railway sometimes of trying to gold plate solutions, but I don’t think we do that. I think we do generally try to find what is the most effective solution, which sometimes costs a little bit more, but sometimes we can do it cheaper. 

Kate: 

I imagine it’s incredibly helpful to understand the technical stuff, even if you’re a manager who’s not doing the technical stuff anymore, to actually be able to understand it and speak the language of the people who are doing the technical engineering – it must be really helpful. Rather than someone who’s come from, perhaps, more of a management-y background, or done either a degree or other career area, but not having that understanding of the engineering, I imagine it must be harder for them to get their head around things. Would you say that’s the case? 

Laura: 

I do think having that understanding helps. So I ended up for a while specialising in GSMR, which, although my degree was actually in 4G technology, the rail is a little bit slow on the uptake, because what we like to do is use proved, tested and known solutions, because we don’t want to be working out the solutions when you got 120 mile/hour train going past you – you want that to work and you want it to be safe. So we do work on the railway with tried and tested and known solutions in that respect. So it was really, really helpful having that background, as I did specialise in GSMR when I came into the railway, to understand how the mobile technology works, the cell planning and that side of things. As you can tell I’m already starting to be quite vague, because I don’t work in that detail anymore, but it is good to be able to listen to what people are trying to do and go – “Well, that doesn’t quite sound right”, and you know when to ask those questions and when to kind of keep digging, I suppose, which you might not know without that background. 

Kate: 

So what kind of personal strengths or qualities would you say you need to have to be successful, but also happy as an engineering professional? Because it sounds like there’s a load of different skills involved, maybe a bit different if you’re more on the management side versus the technical side. So to really sort of be someone who enjoys this, what would you say you need to be good at? 

Laura: 

Networking. I think everything, definitely in the railway, seems to come down to networking. Because you can’t know everything. The railway system is so vast. I mean, we’ve got Chartered Civils Engineers, Chartered Signalling Engineers using the I-REC, you’ve got. IMech. You know, every single discipline pretty much works in the railway, so you need to be able to interact with all the different engineering groups, but also we’ve obviously got passenger interface, we’ve got management, we’ve got ops which is, you know, running the railway day-to-day, and finance – everything you can imagine. So networking is really important, and because you can’t know everything about everything, so you need to know who to talk to and where to go. For me networking is probably a key thing within the railway. And also the ability to read standards. I think whether you like it or not, we do need to be reading the regulations and making sure that we are compliant to what’s being asked to be done. A little bit like I was saying – we’re using tried and tested technology, but there’s also ways to put it in, and although we should challenge standards and know how to challenge standards, we need to understand why they were written in the first place. 

Kate: 

So I’m guessing having a really good attention to detail is important with that, because especially if it’s long legal documentation, it can be quite dry, and it’s so detailed, easy to potentially miss stuff if you’re just skimming it. 

Laura:

Yeah, I think thankfully with legislative stuff, we’ve probably created a Network Rail standard, which is, we are getting into nicer English as opposed to Old English, and really formal. I think if you look at legislation now, it is getting less technical in the wording, is easier to read and manage, which is good and it’s nice, but detail is definitely important, and also how you’re going to integrate with other disciplines or other areas, I think that’s very important. Not working in silos, that is one of the main things that we do need to work on actually in Network Rail, but I think in general. In the third year at York University we did something called our Software Engineering Project, and that was a fantastic experience of team work and long hours to get the grades that you needed to get, because it was a team activity that had to be done. But that is probably a nice intensity to help you understand what life looks like when you go into the real world, on how does a project work, and how do you manage it and the different characters that you have to work with. 

Kate: 

It’s interesting, I think it goes across every profession, doesn’t it? This ability to communicate effectively with other people, collaborate with other people. Because as you say – you can’t be an expert in everything. So knowing who to ask, when to ask and how to ask someone is a skill in itself. So, what do you really love about the work then? Because you’ve sort of had a long and interesting career within sort of engineering. Not too long, don’t worry… What’s the thing that you really love about it? 

Laura: 

What I love about the railway is it is so diverse, it is so different. There are so many different jobs to do, so you can, I guess, try new things. I mean some of the reason I’ve worked in Network Rail for my whole career, is because I’ve had that option and that choice. So as a graduate I managed to get myself onto an insourcing project, so I was looking at how to bring in 500 members of a different company into Network Rail and make sure that all of their records and all of their processes – of course we had to review all of that – make sure that we had an equivalent in Network Rail, and make sure that it kind of joined across well, and then we had to make sure that it got integrated into Network Rail. So I’ve done that at one side, and then from there I went into asset management, which was going – well, what needs renewed next, what do we need to change, what are the requirements for that, and then doing technical visits to see if the kit was still working, or if there was too many failures starting to come in. I then went and worked almost I’d say in the finance area, in the sense of, I was planning a control period – so the railway gets funding groups of five years – so I was part of the group asking for, I think, the £600 million from the government just for the telecoms.  

Kate: 

Wow. 

Laura: 

And telecoms is the smallest department, by the way. So, you know, we asked for… I mean, if you take Transpennine upgrade that’s going on at the moment, that’s a £2billion project that is going to be around for the next 10 years, and it is being really [?] with some of the areas that they’re wanting to work with. So you know we’ve got them there, and then you end up general project engineering, and I guess Systems Engineering, which is where I’m specialising in safety and systems. 

Kate: 

And is that quite common for people to just build their careers, you know, moving across different areas into different types of roles? Or do people tend to stay in one particular specialism? 

Laura: 

And I think they generally stay in the specialism. So I mean, I’ve done telecoms from day one, and I still do telecoms. I’m the first person to be asking the questions about telecoms in my role now, so we do something called periodic meetings, where we check that projects are following the requirements of CSMRA, that I spoke about right at the beginning, and that’s a panel, so you know, you’ve got people from every single discipline, and from ops, and from maintenance, and we’re checking that what we’re going to do is going to be safe, and it’s correct for the railway. But yeah, so I don’t think you stop with your, whatever your original discipline is, shall we say. But on the whole, people stick with whatever they start with. But that doesn’t mean they don’t go to different areas of the business, but still utilising that initial choice. 

Kate: 

I see. I see the difference there. What’s the worst aspect of the role then? It sounds like very interesting, very varied, lots of really good things about it. What’s the worst bit? 

Laura: 

I don’t know whether you can call it the worst… I’m going to call it an amusing story. So, trains, when you’re travelling on them, not the modern trains, so this is why it’s an amusing story really. When you go trackside, when you go to the toilet on the train and you flush it, it actually goes straight down onto the tracks. So if you are trackside at that point, you can end up with a cloud straight into your face, because you also have to watch the train to make sure that it’s passing and it’s… So that’s probably the worst moment. 

Kate: 

Yeah, that does sound pretty bad. 

Laura: 

We have more cleaning points, because, again, when you go to the toilet, things go onto the track. Well, you’ll be pleased to know, most trains don’t do that anymore, so that’s not actually an issue. But yeah, sometimes the hours can be a bit of a pain, but that’s it, really. And even then, they can also be brilliant, because you get a night in a hotel, and with four children a night off is [?]. 

Kate: 

So is it not a nine to five job then? 

Laura: 

It depends. I mean, if you went into maintenance, for example, it’s definitely not a nine to five job, because you’ve got to do 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Christmas. Although, admittedly, that depends on your shift and your rotas and things like that, but we do a 35 hour week is how it averages out. But what those hours are I guess kind of varies depending on your role. I mean on the whole I’m doing a nine to five job, really. But you do have meetings, and with it being a national organisation, it means you have to go to national meetings in various locations. I’ve been to London, Birmingham, Manchester, Scotland, Edinburgh to these meetings. But then when I’m in projects, you can end up anywhere in the country, which is, it’s brilliant, because you see fantastic scenery and you get to, I guess, also you get to upgrade the railway as well, which is quite good fun. 

Kate: 

Well, I think it’s a massive appeal for most people. I think the idea of being chained to a desk doesn’t really appeal to anyone. So I think having that variety and getting the chance to get out and about sometimes – is always nice. 

Laura: 

It is. And if you’re really lucky, and I’ve not being this lucky yet, you can sometimes go abroad with it. So there are the occasional meetings that do require you to go to Germany or France or Australia. I think we’ve even done a few in Canada as well, but as I said, I haven’t been that lucky. 

Kate: 

Well, that that does sound exciting. What do you think the key challenges will be for engineers working in the railway industry over the next few years then? Because you mentioned the sort of Transpennine stuff, and, you know, there’s various sort of upgrades and things like that. But is there anything sort of extra that is useful for people to have a heads up about and start researching or thinking about. 

Laura: 

Well, if we go for telecoms, as I said that’s my personal preference, we’ve got GSMR, which is GSM which is your old, you know when you got your first phone that could text and make phone calls, and that was it. But that is currently how we run the railway. Well, not how we run the railway, that’s the telecoms system that we use to run the railway, that’s getting shut down in the next few years – and I’ve forgotten the exact date and I know someone will listen and will know the exact date, so I’m not going to attempt to tell you – but we’re moving to something called LTE, which is your long term evolution. So we’re looking at changing our mobile to be pretty much up to today’s standards. I say today standards, the standard is actually still in the process of being written in Europe for all mobile phones, let alone the railway mobile phones. But it’s including the requirements for the railway as well. So that would be where I’d say we’re going in realms of telecoms. But also the telecoms is actually what’s going to be running the signalling. So the signalling is your ETCS, it’s European train control system, and that has to get rolled out across the whole of the country. And that is a lifetime, that’s over the next 40 years. So you know, that is pretty much we’re starting now, will be finished after I’ve retired. And that is where we’re actually taking the signals off the tracks, because currently we still have what I can only really describe as traffic lights along side of the railway telling the train driver whether they have to stop or whether they can go. And we’re going to be moving that onto the actual train. So the train will actually be telling you how fast you can go and whether you need to slow down and what’s going to happen. And all that is still really got to be done for the whole of the network. I mean High Speed 2 for example is a brand new railway, and that’s going to be using everything we’ve just discussed, and High Speed 1 actually does as well. But we’re taking everything to the next generation, I suppose, from where it was in 1996. 

Kate: 

So it sounds like basically there’s just huge huge projects and developments going on in the foreseeable. 

Laura: 

Ohh no, definitely. You know, we get multi millions of pounds every five years, and we’ve got to maintain everything as well. So as much as what we’ve just talked about, this is the new technology that’s being brought into, I guess, into the UK, but we’ve still got to look after everything. So we still got the lever trains out there, you know, so people who have to pull the signals on and off, and the kind of things you’d see on Thomas the Tank Engine Railways, that’s still there and that still needs to be upgraded and maintained. So you’ll have a vast variety if you join the railway, you’ll be seeing everything from brands banking you up-to-date Cisco equipment, to copper cable telephones. So you know, it’s everything. 

Kate: 

Does it have any implications for the skills that you need then, if the signalling, for example, is going through this huge transformation, does it mean that the sort of engineers themselves need different types of skills to be able to upgrade all of this? 

Laura: 

Yeah, that is one of our challenges actually. So we’ve got the maintainers from 40 years ago, where there was very, very, very little, let’s call it routing IP, or it didn’t exist. The kind of networking solutions and technologies, you know, when we talk about relays in the railway, you know, we’re not talking about small things, they are chunky, and so there is a very massive change in what we’re doing in that respect. It was a lot more mechanical, shall we say, than it’s going… Now it’s a computer system based trackside, but that computer system is probably also better known by, you know, the people at York University, but only in the sense of they understand software a lot better than, let’s say, what was going on 40 years ago, and the maintainers there. So it’s definitely a moving beast. But with signalling specifically, and to be fair, telecoms, because you have to learn all the old stuff, you still in a very massive learning curve, shall we say, there’s a lot to learn and a lot to do. But when you start going into the world of, let’s say, you know, the IP world and the 5G and the 4G and the long term evolution stuff, it’ll be how are you applying it to the railway, which would be the gap that would need to be learned and understood, if that makes sense. 

Kate: 

Yeah. So on that then, do you have any other advice for students or recent grads who are thinking about working in engineering, either within the sort of telecoms or railway side of things generally? Or any sort of specific tips for Network Rail, because you’ve mentioned doing the grad scheme. Is there anything that would help them stand out in the application process, or is there any sort of particular work experience that would be useful to get to give a real taster of what the work is like? I know you mentioned earlier the group project that you did at uni was really helpful. Is there anything else you’d recommend? 

Laura: 

That is a really good question. And I feel like I should have a good answer. I think it’s being yourself and you’ll know whether or not you like communicating and chatting. As I said, networking is really important and listening and understanding. And I think if you are successful coming into the graduate scheme, then it’s definitely a – be prepared to travel, do not expect to not travel. I think that’s really important that you’ve kind of got your head around that. Because you are going to different areas and different departments week in week out for like the first three to nine months. So it is quite an intense way to get to know the railway area, and we have had some interesting comments from graduates going – why can’t I just stay within 5 metres of, you know, where I’ve been based. Well, because the railway, you know, goes from A to B and all the bits in the middle need to be looked after as well. So definitely that ability, and that want to kind of get out and about and go outside, I guess. From the application process, we want to see that you are team players, so it’s not just about having a first. It’s also about knowing that you interact with people, and whether that’s because you, you know, whatever your activities are, that’s not a problem, it’s just that making sure that you’re doing interactive things with people, it’s not just insular, I guess. 

Kate: 

Brilliant. Well, for more info about the careers we’ve mentioned today, I’m going to add some relevant links to the episode description and a link to the full transcript of today’s show. But Laura, thank you so much for taking time out to do that. It’s really interesting. I feel like I’ve learned a lot. I’m still feeling quite disturbed about the toilet story. 

Laura: 

It’s only the special trains now. 

Kate: 

Those poor engineers, no one ever knew. Thank you so much for taking time to do this. 

Laura: 

No worries. Thank you.