The Two Railway Tribes: Engineers and Managers

Lockdown's getting to me as we move into year 2 and, since my family situation has changed, there's not enough work around, and I've suspended my university course until I can go back to the SU bar and the library and not have to endure Zoom lectures, I'm very bored and lonely. (I guess there are similar tales of woe for many or most people.) So I thought I'd use some of the time by writing more about topics at the intersection of my professional (and personal) interests: railways, of course; management; history; engineering; and current affairs. The lofty imagined objective, even if the posts make only a microscopic contribution, is to make the world a happier place through better railways, or at least to help others do that. The real objective is to do anything else than trudge round the empty cold streets of Camden for the thousandth time.

Some of my previous LinkedIn articles and posts have created quite a bit of interest but others nearly none at all so it would be great to get feedback (is this stuff useful, or just indulgent wittering? - I can take it!) and ideas for other topics to cover. I'm also at pains to emphasise I don't want to tilt at windmills, or rewrite my own past: I'm not criticising anybody or anything, just offering thoughts on the many interesting things I've seen over my pretty wide-ranging career, and perhaps suggesting ideas which might be helpful to people running railways now and in the future. If anybody is annoyed by what I write, or I'm factually wrong, please tell me, publicly or in private. I'd love to have alternative views and will instantly correct wrongheaded assertions.

Being at root a railway engineer who then inevitably got sucked into management I've always been interested in how these two quite different tribes, with different language, rituals, and these days status, intersect and often miscomprehend each other. Railways are an amazing mash-up of the two disciplines. Nearly every branch of engineering is involved (railways being the ultimate system); while few spheres of human activity have comparable organisational and management challenges, involving safety criticality, large numbers of geographically spread staff who have to cooperate like clockwork, an unfathomable range of activities, mind-blowing sums of money, and interface with the public masses. All of these factors ensure that there is always intense political and media interest, often in recent decades unfairly hostile. If only journalists had some insight into railway engineering (or, come to that, management). Most railway issues have both engineering and management perspectives but sometimes decisions are taken and choices made which seem to be not binocular but taken with one eye shut. That doesn't lead to the best outcomes.

The early railway pioneers fully understood this. There was only one tribe then. It was railways against canal and stage-coach owners and often everyone else. I've just read the classic biography of George and Robert Stephenson by L T C Rolt written in the 1960s which makes this clear. The father (and son) of railways had to do everything: designing, building and driving the locomotives and infrastructure; raising capital (by creating and articulating the business case); dealing with parliament; surveying the land and deciding on a route; setting business strategy; inventing railway operations as well as engines. (That's probably them in the article picture tending their locomotive 'Northumbrian' in around 1830 just after the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened). Robert, in particular, was good at both management and engineering; he was the designer and improver of steam locomotives, bridges and much else, and the entrepreneur and managing director of the Stephensons' Locomotive Works in Newcastle which became a world-leading manufacturer in the new industry.

As railways rapidly became bigger and more complex it was soon necessary to specialise and the two tribes formed but even so the impossibility of creating and running railways without engineers and managers working together was understood. The great symbiotic pairing of Frank Pick and Lord Ashfield, who propelled London Transport to world greatness between the world wars, had a natural division of labour between them with Pick focusing on the technical and aesthetic, and Ashfield the organisational, economic and political, always within a framework of mutual understanding.

Since WW2 however, mirroring changes in British society as a whole, engineering and technical proficiency has it seems slipped down the hierarchy of status in railways to become just another function, like Finance or HR, with rewards and influence declining to match. This is a commonplace observation: is it really true? Well, I can't remember working in a big railway organisation with a leader (or leadership team) who had an engineering focus, with one brief exception, Metronet, though there have been times when engineers did make it to the top but only by turning king's witness. In one incident seared in my mind, I remember brokering a meeting at Birdcage Walk, the IMechE HQ, between the MD of a big rail company (originally an engineer) and a national group of highly respected engineers, to try to find common ground on a topic of some contention - where the technical view was different from the visionary, political one of the MD. Perhaps the meeting did no harm, but it wasn't a meeting of minds. At one point the MD muttered that he'd had enough of 'old school railway engineers'. The engineers, for their part, were much more muted in their criticisms of the MD's vision when faced with management might than they were in the pub. Sometimes the two tribes may communicate, but without mutual comprehension and respect. So an unhealthy decades-long stand-off has arisen, which at times can become tribal.

This, I think, is an opportunity for our railways as we think about rebuilding after Covid, and with forthcoming structural reform. It's not so much that the railway needs to be run once again by engineers, but instead that there should be a richer dialogue with more of a presumption that engineers can and should assume senior leadership roles, and that the top table can never be quorate, on any topic, without an engineering voice. Moreover, non-technical leaders could and should know more about, and participate in, the technical discussions and decisions of the day. Engineers would have to change, too. They should be thoroughly appraised of the economics, politics, societal and public relations implications of their choices and they must work harder to make the management tribe understand the trade-offs and the immutable facts that are the core of railway engineering. Instead of pleading always for more money to spend on this and that 'innovation' or yet more trials, instead of adding endless complexity, they should come forward with opportunities, complete with thought-through, well-argued quantified business cases which take into account the broader implications that managers have to deal with.

Far too often, engineering is seen merely as an unavoidable cost: engineers are blockers who gold-plate everything. Unfortunately this canard probably has some truth, since the engineers know that they and not the managers will be the ones held legally and reputationally responsible when things go wrong - and in railway engineering the potential for that is wildly high. That said, in arguing against short-term cost cuts, engineers should do a better job of explaining long-term implications, but without being unnecessarily alarmist and 'shroud waving'. Engineering risk should be better explained. Upsides should be tabled alongside downsides.

So where is the opportunity? My mind is full of them: often I have been in a position of having some insight into the divergent worldviews of both tribes, and just wished I could bring them together in a pub (remember them?) and get them to parley. Really talk, and listen. And then agree to do something different and better (not just a compromise). Sometimes pre-Covid, on some issues, I was even able to do that, with great outcomes. And, to be fair, I think that the stand-off today is less than it was in say the 2000s. The railway, at least in this respect, is healthier than it once was, and the national government no longer talks down science and engineering as it once did. But there is still much more to do. Part of this is structural: dividing the industry into bits hasn't helped, as I have written before, but this can be overstated. There are plenty of great cross-industry forums and bodies which help. Even, so, I don't believe the engineering and non-engineering parts of the industry are doing enough to work together. Let's look at some examples.

ERTMS/ETCS ('digital railway') is a comprehensive, ambitious and technically proficient solution to modernising train control, but it is very expensive, has prolonged timescales, and there is a danger that once installed it will make subsequent network and rolling stock changes economically and practically even harder than they are now. It may be the right solution on high-density railways, though even there perhaps its capacity advantages have been oversold in the absence of fully functional real-time train-management systems. In fact, the bottlenecks to capacity on closer analysis are likely to be stations, junctions and train acceleration and braking rather than just train-control. Not as exciting as a 'digital railway', but engineering reality. Is it really the right solution across the country in a post-Covid railway where flexibility, agility, and above all a sharp reduction in fixed and opex costs are paramount? I don't know the answer, but I think there's a discussion to be had. There will be ways to adapt to the core digital railway technology to particular circumstances, to speed things up, simplify, and reduce costs.

Friends working on Crossrail and its leaders in public have talked many times about the tsunami of paperwork necessary to get the now complete railway up and running and in service. I would be the last person to argue against proper safety process and certification, but the layers of documentation combined with organisational complexity may have reached their limits, and indeed the concern must be that the sheer volume of detailed assurance work might result in the failure to surface obvious problems, whereas less critical ones are addressed in smothering detail. This is a difficult issue but thoughtful reform of assurance processes for complex new bits of railway is needed, which will require a rich two-way discussion between engineers and everyone else.

Boring for trainspotters but bliss for engineers, standardisation of trains is not much talked about these days. We have agreed Key Train Requirements, but they're not mandatory, and the proliferation of new train types is colourful and interesting but is also costly now and in the future, not just in multiple design and build episodes but in maintenance and staff training. Standardisation is seen as being anti-innovation, and anti-competition, and there's something in that, but is the balance right?

British Rail Research was in the 70s and 80s a leader in understanding that ultimate piece of railway engineering, the wheel-rail interface (WRI). The WRI gives rise to a great deal of industry cost and is a key parameter in setting system performance. But is it optimal? For example, might different choices in wheel and rail steels and profiles, train braking and sanding, lubrication and friction modifiers (perhaps carried on trains rather than being lineside), give better overall results? There are still cross-industry bodies discussing these matters and keeping things safe, but would a broader discussion involving engineers and 'management', at the system level, lead to different, better answers? I don't know, but I suspect so (I should disclose that I do a little work in this area).

Decarbonisation is much in vogue at present, as it should be, and a healthy discussion is taking place. But is a discussion even necessary? Most railway engineers who've looked at the numbers, and who (being engineers) understand energy issues consummately, already know what the answer is: electrification. It doesn't have to be full-blow, high-cost 25kV AC overhead. Batteries allow discontinuous systems, so the electrification doesn't need to be everywhere. Third rail systems with control so that sections are live only when a train is there, and sheathed systems with side or underside contact, could deal with the safety risks of third rail and be much cheaper than traditional OHLE. Sure, hydrogen has a much higher energy density than batteries, though nowhere near diesel and it also has high costs and poor round-trip energy efficiency. Much better to generate the power elsewhere, using a wind-turbine in the North Sea, and take it to the train.

These are just some ideas, none of them original (and some of them boring hobby-horses of mine), and which I do not here advocate, but where I do believe a richer flow of ideas between the two tribes of railway engineering and management would be helpful. This would be facilitated, it has to be said, by restoring the engineering tribe to the status it has lost since the Stephensons.

To conclude, if you're a railway engineer, then take the time and interest to explore the management of railways beyond engineering: it's truly fascinating, I promise. If you're a non-technical railway manager, then the reverse really is also true. The terms and acronyms and some of the technical concepts can be quite a barrier but you will always find an enthusiastic engineer willing to teach you. Like learning a foreign language, it's well worthwhile not just so you can order a beer on holiday (remember them?) but better to understand the other tribe and therefore your own. If you're already in both tribes then good for you: you were the past, and will be the future.