Great Western Coffee Shop

The content of the speech given by Andrew Haines, Network Rail CEO, to the Modern Railways' Golden Whistles Awards and Conference in London on the 25th of January 2019 is available online at:

https://cdn.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Andrew-Haines-speech-the-central-importance-of-the-operating-function-25-1-19.pdf (https://cdn.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Andrew-Haines-speech-the-central-importance-of-the-operating-function-25-1-19.pdf)

It is well worth reading.

Yes, an interesting read, but......its too late.  All the people with the multi-disiplined knowledge have gone or retired.  It will take 10 years minimum to rebuild that, and by then Andrew Haines will be gone himself and the 'focus' will be lost again.

In my time in RT/NR I worked with some really knowledgable people who knew their railway inside out, and when we designed new signalling schemes their input was invaluable.  I remember one scheme where the engineered track layout looked lovely on paper but when the operators looked at it they said 'that will never work'.  We developed a system where for designing a new scheme we started with a long roll of paper with just the core track layout drawn on it and then got the operations guys (and ladies) to add on it where the crossovers etc. should be.  Facinating stuff to watch and be involved in at the time.

This is a far wider issue than just on the railways.  During my working life I have seen a series of jobs / professions move from general purpose practitioners to specialists.

I originally qualified as an accountant.  In my training I did accountancy, audit, personal tax and corporate tax.   Now people are specialists before they start.  I was in at the beginning of IT and have done systems analysis, programming, server management, security, networking, business process, infrastructure design and management.  Very few people do this range today.

Other users of the forum will have seen similar changes in their working lives.