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Lynsay Callaghan
1 minute read time.

As of June 2023, the IET assumed the rotating roles of chair and secretariat for the Railway Engineers Forum, or REF as it is known within the member Institutions. 

 Founded 10 years ago, the REF includes representation from those professional institutions with an interest in promoting engineering best practice in the railway industry.  The original aim of the REF was to harmonise the activities of the constituent Institutions, enabling them to devise and implement programmes of activities that would support the railway community, regardless of their professional affiliation. This role would encompass cross-promotion of conferences, seminars, lectures, training, information services, publications and statements of policy to Government and other Regulatory Bodies.  Essentially, the REF would provide a single point of contact allowing professionals in the industry to find details of relevant events hosted by each of the member institutions. 

The way we manage our professional lives has changed over the last decade, and as we embark on our two-year role as the chair of the REF, the IET Railway Technical Network is looking to revisit the mission of the REF, and redefine what we do.

So, for those in the Railway arena, what role can the REF carve for itself from here on?  What do you think can be done to add greater practical value to the REF in a modern industrial setting and, ultimately, how can it best benefit its members and the rail industry as a whole?   How can REF make best use of its unique assets (the facilities of the member institutions and their combined expert membership) to where should we position the REF to create relevance within the industry? 

 

 

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  • First off, I had never even heard of REF before I saw this blog post! Which given my role in the rail industry (including the fact that I'm a member of two of the member institutes) is...interesting. So making those of us in the industry aware that REF even exists would be a very good start!

    We do need far more cross-discipline discussion in the UK rail industry, and useful though the work carried out by RSSB and RIA is in supporting those discussions I still feel there is a gap in general background best practice knowledge sharing. Modern rail infrastructure relies on the effective integration of all engineering disciplines signalling, electrical, civil, systems and safety engineering (plus Scada, telecomms, etc etc), yet all too often these disciplines sit in their own areas until forced to work together. In an ideal world, pulling these disciplines together to consider approaches to working together more effectively would seem exactly the sort of role that the PEIs were originally set up for.

    The big advantage we have in the rail industry is that so much of the engineering is "open book". We all face the same challenges, what we do is typically already open to scrutiny, and it's well known joke that we all rotate around the various companies anyway! So there is a great opportunity for REF to enable  (relatively) free and frank discussions about how to best solve our present and upcoming problems.

    The challenge, I suspect, is getting people around the table prepared to admit that we as an industry have problems. A really good start would be for REF to convene SWOT analyses for the technical aspects of the rail industry - if the risks and challenges (and opportunities) can be open and honestly discussed and identified then I suspect there will be a lot of will to solve them. Ok, there will still be no money to solve them, but that's the clever bit of engineering - solving something with nothing!

    Thanks,

    Andy

Comment

  • First off, I had never even heard of REF before I saw this blog post! Which given my role in the rail industry (including the fact that I'm a member of two of the member institutes) is...interesting. So making those of us in the industry aware that REF even exists would be a very good start!

    We do need far more cross-discipline discussion in the UK rail industry, and useful though the work carried out by RSSB and RIA is in supporting those discussions I still feel there is a gap in general background best practice knowledge sharing. Modern rail infrastructure relies on the effective integration of all engineering disciplines signalling, electrical, civil, systems and safety engineering (plus Scada, telecomms, etc etc), yet all too often these disciplines sit in their own areas until forced to work together. In an ideal world, pulling these disciplines together to consider approaches to working together more effectively would seem exactly the sort of role that the PEIs were originally set up for.

    The big advantage we have in the rail industry is that so much of the engineering is "open book". We all face the same challenges, what we do is typically already open to scrutiny, and it's well known joke that we all rotate around the various companies anyway! So there is a great opportunity for REF to enable  (relatively) free and frank discussions about how to best solve our present and upcoming problems.

    The challenge, I suspect, is getting people around the table prepared to admit that we as an industry have problems. A really good start would be for REF to convene SWOT analyses for the technical aspects of the rail industry - if the risks and challenges (and opportunities) can be open and honestly discussed and identified then I suspect there will be a lot of will to solve them. Ok, there will still be no money to solve them, but that's the clever bit of engineering - solving something with nothing!

    Thanks,

    Andy

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