How the Railways Will Fix the Future by Gareth Dennis

Author:Gareth Dennis [Dennis, Gareth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2024-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2.5

MANY HANDS MAKE LIGHT WORK

The railways provide a solid link between our past and our future. Whether walking out along the railway with a pencil in hand to review its condition or undertaking localised maintenance by bashing it with a big steel rod, many of the roles that require people to put boots on ballast have remained the same since the inception of the railways many centuries ago. As technology and society have advanced around us, very few jobs still offer that link.

The reason I work in the rail industry — I design railways for a living, and it is literally my dream job — is because it feels like my calling, it makes a difference to the world, and is immensely gratifying as a result.

However, the reason I love working for the railways is that it is, more than anything else, an industry full of passionate people who care about running — or creating the space to run — better railway services. It is an industry of immense skill and care, and meeting and collaborating with those people fills me with excitement and delight.

Without these people, the railways would be nothing.

And yet, across the world, these people are taken for granted by the ultimate powers who control the railways. Whether it is the pressure applied to their working conditions or safety, to their ability to grow and retain skills, or to their ability to join the industry in the first place, workers on the railways are not given the opportunities they need to thrive, and consequently the railway cannot thrive either.

If we see the railway as a necessary — indeed critical — component in the way humanity tackles the challenges of the future, then in turn we need a plan to deploy them as quickly, fairly and effectively as possible.

That plan enables us to understand the shape of the railway, what assets and technologies it will need, how it will operate and who it will serve.

However, that plan cannot be delivered without skilled and dedicated people. Whether it is planners, engineers, drivers, signallers, managers, surveyors, cleaners, fitters — I honestly can’t even capture a representative selection of the roles required to run a railway, the list is so diverse and all-encompassing — each individual requires skills that cannot be willed into existence by policy alone. To grow and retain the workforce needed to deliver the future, the most important thing is to develop that plan and stick to it. But a plan alone is not enough.

We need to empower organised labour through increased power and involvement of unions. We need to get rid of outdated silos and categories of skills types, not least jettisoning the “STEM” initialisation and many of its associated initiatives into the sun, to maximise the number and diversity of people joining the industry. Most of all, we need to totally reverse the atomisation and fragmentation of the rail industry, reintegrating much of the wider outsourcing supply chain into the national or devolved railway organisations.

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