Engineering: The Perfect Retirement Job?

I was interested to read a piece in Infrastructure Intelligence this week which suggested that the engineering industry is losing out on the experience of older people by failing to support them in later life. This surprised me, because that hasn't been my experience at all. 
I'm thinking of several people for whom engineering has proved the ideal retirement job, provided that companies allow them to focus on doing what they do best: great technical work and passing on their expertise to the next generation. After all, who would willingly give up a job as endlessly fascinating and useful as bridges and railways, roads and flood defences?

International Women's Day: Why I'm Pledging for Parity in the Rail Industry

The theme for this year's International Women's Day is to Pledge for Parity: "to change everything, we need everyone" because everyone can contribute to creating an inclusive culture. So what does that look like in engineering, and particularly the rail industry? I highly recommend the ICE's series of Engineering Change short talks (you could use these as conversation starters in a team briefing this month!)

Engineering change takes all of us - yes, you too! (image (c) Institution of Civil Engineers)

Living Life in Orange

As the time approaches for me to renew my Personal Track Safety (PTS) accreditation, here's a summary of the things that I get asked most frequently about how the railway really works. 
Disclaimer: this post is obviously NOT intended to be a substitute for the PTS course! If you want more information on railway safety, see the videos and resources on Network Rail's Safety Central site or read some of the incident reports produced by the RAIB.
One reason for the course is that most people underestimate just how dangerous the railway environment is. After all, from the perspective of passengers, the railway is as safe as we can possibly make it, and you are considerably less likely to be killed or injured as a train passenger than by driving to your destination. But this leads to problems at level crossings, the one place where members of the public interact with trains travelling at their normal speed. People tend to assume that the stopping distance for a train is similar to a bus or a lorry travelling at 30mph on an urban road.

Inspiration and Ideas: Transport Books

Looking for more book reviews or reading suggestions? Follow posts tagged "Inspiration and Ideas"...
Being a rail engineer, I read plenty of books about transport (as previously noted, these are not usually the ones featuring steam trains!) So here are my current favourites:

1) Planning Sustainable Transport, Barry Hutton (Routledge, 2014)
This is currently my favourite book about transport, because it really opened my mind to concepts that make a great deal of sense but are rarely discussed. For example, consider the space budget, beautifully illustrated by this sequence of images showing how much space 200 people take up in 170 cars, two buses, on foot or bike or on a tram. Or, consider how transport planning usually assumes that people have a fixed start and end point and a choice of the way in which you get there. This isn't actually true, for example out-of-town shopping centres which assume you travel by car: people avoid congestion in central York by changing their destination as well! So land use is intimately linked to transport options, but are usually considered completely separately.

Availability - do we really need a 24 hour health service?

The ICE has been trying to stimulate debate about the availability of infrastructure: for example, to what extent is it more resilient or cost effective to allow trains not to run or close a main road in cases of extreme weather? During the 2007 floods, most of Gloucestershire lost power (some people were not reconnected for 12 days). Most people believe this is not acceptable, but the answer may not lie solely in making the national grid so robust it can cope with high winds and powerful water currents, but also by beefing up secondary sources of power (whether generators or solar panels) and accepting that no system works 100% of the time.

After all, there is no railway signal box in the country that relies on only one source of power: most have some combination of having two cables in from different power sources, an 8 or 12 hour battery, a small transformer to get low voltage supply off the 25kV traction power lines and a plug at the back where you can turn up and plug in a generator. And business continuity matters too: suppliers to Network Rail must demonstrate that they have a business continuity plan in place.

Holiness in Action: God at Work

"People go out to their work and to their labor until the evening” (Ps. 104:23). 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it another way: 

"After the first morning hour [of prayer], the Christian’s day until evening belongs to work." 

Indeed, for many of us a full hour to pray before our work starts would be a blessed luxury! This balance of our time has been the same for centuries. When the Benedictine order of monks was founded on the principle of "work and prayer", where work informed prayer and vice versa, without holding one of these to be more important than the other. But have we lost this perspective today? Do we instead consider them to be totally separate activities?

Many people put a very hard distinction between work and prayer saying "I can feel God close to me when I'm in church, but God can't really be interested in what I do all day, can he? It's only what I do to pay the bills." But the Creator of the universe delights in what we do, because our work reflect the image of God himself as we engage in creating and maintaining order and beauty in God's world. 

So does God care whether the trains run on time, or if a whole community like Western Cornwall are cut off by rail because of a collapsed sea wall (as happened at Dawlish last year)? Does God care whether the law is upheld, justice is done, people are served, children are educated?

Thinking Long Term: Why "Doing it for the kids" is not good enough

Principle 3: Intergenerational Stewardship (or Thinking Long Term)

This post examines the concept of intergenerational stewardship, the 3rd principle of sustainable infrastructure (see the introduction to this series inspired by the book “Sustainable Infrastructure: Principles into Practice”).

We don't inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children (Anon)

The concept of protecting the earth for our children has been one of the key ways that people have understood the environmental movement over the last 30 years. It has been posited that as a direct appeal to people's emotions, this is a strong motivation for people to act. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn't seem to support this view.

What is Infrastructure For? Social and Economic Sustainability Goals

Principle 2: Social and economic development

‘If you’re asking me to choose between conservation and development, I’m going to choose development every time.' Community worker in Democratic Republic of Congo

This is part of a series inspired by the book Sustainable Infrastructure. What is infrastructure for? And do we really have to make a choice between meeting people's needs and protecting the environment, as the quote above suggests? 

The purpose of most infrastructure is to improve social or economic outcomes (and let's face it, when one third of the world's people have no access to sanitation, there's no shortage of need) and that's why economic issues have traditionally been the biggest influence over project scoping and delivery.

For example, many projects are justified on the basis of a cost-benefit ratio, which may consider only benefits within the organisation (eg reduced maintenance and operation costs for a railway) or may additional calculate the wider economic benefits to users (eg the business case for HS2).

Advent Reflections 7: Finding Our Purpose

 “For we know that nothing we do for the Lord is ever useless” 1 Cor 15:58 

At the beginning of a new year, many of us have hopes and dreams as well as fears for the future. So now seems like a good time to consider our purpose. A sense of purpose can be powerful enough to keep us motivated through difficult times, but it can be hard to find, especially when we are demoralised. The simple fact is, much of what we do feels pointless and too small to make a difference, a drop in the ocean.

Over the Christmas period, we have considered God’s awesome creation, made with love, the frustration of living in a world of sin and death (and the need tolament the tragedies of life) and his great plan for redemption through Emmanuel. This is where the final part of the Bible’s story comes into play for us: the consummation of all our hopes, the resurrection and redemptionof the whole world.

Getting Transport Policy Right: The Harrogate Line Blues

Since August, my new job in Harrogate has meant a daily commute on the York – Harrogate – Leeds line, a secondary route in need of some TLC. But before I explain the problems, here are four things I love about my daily train journey:

1. The fantastic view over Knaresborough and the Nidd gorge from the Nidd Viaduct.
2. Mist rising gently over the flat fields of the Vale of York between York and Knaresborough (ie before it gets into the hills).

Making a difference in Manchester

A group of London engineers recently made a video of "Engineering Happiness" featuring engineers dancing to the song "Happy" at locations around the capital where civil engineers have changed lives, from the Thames Barrier and sewage works to the Olympic Park and the new Crossrail tunnels.

Here's my own story of engineering pride: I saw a tram today at Manchester Airport.

Can we engineer an environmentally responsible HS2?

On the HS2 front, I think we should take the position of a "critical friend" - my previous post argues that there is a genuine need to be addressed and therefore I believe we should support the principle of building new rail capacity (it's not a vanity project as some have characterised it), but the detail of where and how we build it needs a lot of careful thought. Route selection for London to Birmingham is slowly getting there, but the preferred route for the sections further north is still under discussion and we can have an influence here (the route will eventually go to Manchester and Leeds and then on to Scotland). 

Should an environmentalist support HS2?

I have promised previously to write about HS2 and this week presented an opportunity as I debated the issue with friends from Christian Ecology Link. The discussion was sparked off by a recent Guardian article which concluded that “areas of irreplaceable natural value along the planned HS2 route, including 48 ancient woodlands that are home to rare bats and butterflies would be damaged by just phase one of the route (London to Birmingham)”. So is it possible to justify such destruction and still call myself an environmentalist?

Winter Woes for a (not very) resilient railway

This week, I had an interesting discussion with the asset management engineer at Network Rail who is responsible for all the earthworks between London and the Scottish border on the east side of the Pennines. On his wall, he had a set of Met Office maps which compare the rainfall in a particular month with the 30-year average: the South East and South West are completely covered in deep blue, indicating greater than 200% and 300% of the normal average rainfall for three months in a row (Dec 2013 to Feb 2014). Fortunately for my colleague, the East Coast Mainline has mainly kept out of the danger zone, so we've escaped the worst of the problems.

2014: Review of the first quarter!

We're nearly at the end of the first quarter of 2014 and I think that makes it time for a review of the year so far. I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front lately but I'm hoping to make up for that in April – I have loads of ideas and looking forward to some time over Easter to put them onto paper (virtually, at least). I set myself the aim this year that every month I will try to make a difference to climate change in four areas: personal and work-related carbon emissions, campaigning and prayer.

A Knotty Question: Green or Greenwashed?

I set myself the challenge this month of reading my company's annual sustainability report. There's some great stuff in here which we can be justly proud of. We are one of the world's biggest environmental and engineering consultants, with some impressive stories from low carbon buildings to new wastewater treatment plants that can remove much higher proportions of pollutants such as nitrates from sewage and capture methane from solid sludge as a source of energy for the plant. We have also worked with councils to change user behaviour when it comes to waste and divert 95% of waste away from landfill. We have committed to WRAP's commitment to halve the volume of construction waste arising from our projects which goes to landfill.

Towards a Sustainable Railway - Part 2

A few weeks ago, I met an environmental consultant who told me about a small architectural practice which he had helped to implement an environmental management system accredited under ISO14001 – but this ONLY related to their office environment, not their project work. I'm not sure which of us was more surprised by this conversation: me, that any company could be stupid enough to think that recycling the office's waste paper is 'doing enough' while failing to address energy efficiency and waste in the buildings they design, or him, when I told him that no public sector client would ever employ a consultant engineering firm in today's marketplace who doesn't have an effective EMS for their projects.
But sometimes I wonder if we have allowed this to put sustainability in a box.

Towards a Sustainable Railway – Part 1

My first stage in working out where I can usefully contribute to making the railways more sustainable is to consider where our environmental impacts are coming from. Today I'll consider the impacts from normal operation of the railway, for example powering trains, buildings and encouraging passengers and freight to use more sustainable forms of transport.

Good news - British railways are getting better!

Here is a good news story that you don't hear very often: Britain is currently undergoing the biggest investment in railway infrastructure since the  Victorian era, with plans now approved for £37bn of investment over the next 5 years (note that this figure includes normal operations and maintenance as well as enhancement work).
And no, I'm not talking about HS2, being the only railway project most people have heard of! In fact, I'm talking about what's happening to improve our existing railways: Network Rail has a big vision for how we could make the railways work better and the long term funding to make it happen. And a recent report by the European Commission which compared progress in all EU countries since 1990 concluded that we have the most improved railway network in Europe. 

Storms, Floods and Landslides - An Engineer's Tale

At this point in my blog, I could try to explain to you the science behind climate change, and the ever-growing body of evidence demonstrating that the atmosphere is getting warmer and that this is almost certainly the result of human activity releasing astonishingly huge quantities of greenhouse gases. I could show you the 5^th report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published this year demonstrating yet again the consensus from scientists across the world about this problem.
But I won't, because you learned the basics of the greenhouse effect at school and people have an uncanny tendency to switch off as soon as anything is mentioned that relies upon them understanding any details about the workings of the troposphere. I am not a climate scientist, I'm a civil engineer. So instead, I will tell my own story of how the change in our climate is already affecting us in the UK and my daily work through storms, floods and landslides.