Ryan shares the life and journey of a young rail apprentice with our community every quarter.

Hello again, I hope everyone is doing well. Despite working from home still I am happy with all the things I’ve still been able to do / get involved with.
I have just signed up for NEBOSH (National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health) National General Certificate – online. This is a well-recognised health and safety qualification.

I am looking forward to making my way through the different sections and examinations of the certificate. It is good to have a new challenge and goal to work towards, as well as help with furthering my knowledge in such a useful subject, with health and safety being so prevalent not only within the rail industry but in everything we do. I intend to get as much out of the course as possible and bring what I learn into my projects and day to day life.

I recently attended the two-part online Automated Railways Seminar co-hosted by the PWI and other Professional Engineering Institutions. It was great to hear from the vast range of speakers from around the world, presenting information about such an interesting topic and what we will be working with in the future.

One part I found particularly interesting was how we will be able to use the automated trains to still be as effective as detecting obstacles and preventing intrusions, as this is one of the biggest engineering hurdles with GoA (Grade of Automation) level 3 (Driverless) and level 4 (Fully unattended train). For example, the uses of GoA3/4 around today are isolated from the real-world environment (tunnels / viaducts). This is all well and good, however, one of the issues with integrating this level of automation onto the wider railway is ‘at grade running’ and how we may detect an obstacle such as a landslip or even a member of railway maintenance out on track.

The overall seminar was greatly informative and another reason showing why it is so useful to take every opportunity the PWI give to learn new things.

In the near future, I hope to finish my PWI EngTech application. It is something that I have been working towards for a while and it has been a great challenge. I would definitely recommend to other young engineers to work towards professional registration as it will help you to push yourself to learn new things and develop yourself as an engineer.