40 years ago today.....

Its apparent that people enjoy posting their “40 years in…” on Linkedin.?This is my first Linkedin article and its “40 years in the rail industry today”.?Don’t feel the need to read any / all - it’s a personal brain dump of 40 unexpected years. ?I will mention some of people who have helped me along the way (brevity does not permit all) and to avoid their embarrassment, omit those whose purpose seemed to be to put a spoke on my wheel.?I never had that carer or job dilemma many experience – from the age that I realised I could, I wanted to join “the railway” (as it was simply known back then).

Monday 6 Sept 1982 I joined the Western Region of British Rail in Reading S&T Department.?I learnt my trade indoors and out but always on the Western from such heroes as Mark Brookes (testing), Dennis Hagger (design) Roger Phelps & John Madeley (mechanical locking), sadly now all now transferred to that great railway in the sky (I still recall John telling me there wouldn’t be any diesels in heaven but 863 GWR Pannier tanks - i.e. all of them).?Andy Walton and I looked after the Reading area electronic systems covering anything from Hot Axle Box Detectors (based on heat-seeking missile technology) to car park payment machines.?Then at the weekends we did the last lever frame tests on the Chiltern area mechanical signal boxes before they were swept away by re-signalling.

12 Dec 1988 was the Clapham Junction rail accident – geographically very close to home and it brought home to me - and many others - the reality of getting it wrong. ?In Jan 1991, I moved to BR Board as Applications Engineer a job which looking back was probably a best fit for my natural skills.?Enabling new technology (especially software-based systems) to be used effectively in the field.?At the time the team had commissioned the first solid state interlocking IN THE WORLD (and that involved someone manually validating the 1s and the 0s).?My time was mostly occupied with another world first, the first VDU-based signalman’s control system (IECC) including Automatic Route-setting (ARS).?These were all years before we had EN standards to guide us through any safety or approvals process – the question “how safe is safe enough?” was a real everyday one.?Here were Dennis Lamb, Don Newing, Gerald Brook , Robert Davis , Andy Harrison who introduced me to safety-critical software, systems thinking and safety-as-a-process which all gave direction to my career.?Combined with the Clapham Junction accident investigation, this was the genesis of the “Yellow Book” and in due course iESM www.intesm.org (now tucked under the wing of my friend Steve Bickley ) that was to become my stock in trade.?I moved through posts at InterCity and Network SouthEast where, to me at least, the GB railway reached its zenith of service and consistency and for little or no subsidy.?

Unfortunately, John Major (oh, I said I wouldn’t mention the spokes) didn’t see it that way and rushed us into a botched rail privatisation from which the GB travelling public still suffers.?I resented his label of “inefficient” having then spent ten years doing more with less, in a culture that demanded everything be as cheap as possible, yet still world-leading.

A brief spell at Railtrack MPD introduced me to Michael Hamlyn , my greatest mentor, who gave my career an international flavour.?Together with Graeme Christmas and Roger Clutton , we pieced together MHA Systems an embryonic signalling and rolling stock consultancy.?We were able to pick the brightest and the best who had fallen out of the rail privatisation machine. ?Looking back, it was only for a few years but it contained the most challenging, satisfying, purposeful and fun moments of my career.?There were good days and hard days but it was the best team of people. ?Ever. ?We delivered many industry innovative firsts – multi-ended axle counters, fleet tilting trains, mission impossible Pendolino, IECC & SSI upgrades.?MHA was bought in 2001 by Lloyd’s Register as their re-entry to the rail market, which for a while – as acquisitions often are – was no big change.?By the mid noughties I had moved / been moved out of our rail business into an HQ function which I enjoyed at the time and led me to many weeks in mainland China as it opened up with the irrepressible Christine Wong and Korea with Sukhy Barhey and Young-Sang Kim developing their rail business. Also to Australia (post-Waterfall – their Clapham Junction moment) where?I loved my time down under and the people there and I did feel I was able to make some sort of difference. Working at LR HQ with Martin Cottam also enabled me to see first hand how safety risks were managed – very differently - in a wider range of other industries.?

By 2009 it had all gone wrong (no names this time) and I was out on my ear – the old LRMHA managed a few years longer before it too was seen off to new owners. Fortunately, I was scooped up by Rob Davis who found me a seat in Technical Programme Delivery (TPD) a smaller boutique consultancy.?Like MHA before it, there was a project management flavour but enough room to enable me to continue as poacher or gamekeeper in the rail safety field.?We re-established a presence in Hong Kong and later, albeit abortively, Australia.?With an expert team of associates, we carved a small niche to support the Hong Kong Rail Regulator EMSD, which due to the COVID restrictions remains on largely on hold.

Its been 13 years with TPD now and enabled rail-related work and training in several more countries – Israel, Taiwan, Japan, India, Singapore which I had never dreamed I would go to, let alone earn a living in when I joined BR 40 years ago.?My ambition then was to see myself through to retirement having made a difference to the mainline railway in UK.?Did I??I am not sure now.?Would I do it again??Perhaps, but I wonder if the effort of keeping a safe industry safer might have been better spent on tackling risks elsewhere. ?I am not even sure if all the safety risk-related stuff means anything when I see the arbitrary and unscientific way that governments attempted to manage a pandemic whilst forgoing the aid of risk assessment tools.?

What comes next??Honestly, I am not sure.?My wife died in 2014 and I was ill in 2019 - so although I claim 40 years – not all of those years have been fully focussed on the job.?In another year I will be 60, so maybe that is a good time to stop??However in the current economic climate (let alone the state of our railway) I am not sure deliberately deciding to stop makes any sense.?So there we are, 40 years, mostly well spent, mostly in trying to bring safe innovation to railways.