Latest news across the Rail Industry

How storms and flooding affect the railway

Floods, high winds and landslips can destroy railway infrastructure and block lines, so Network Rail teams repair damage and clear debris to ensure trains can continue to run. Read more…

Rail operator unveils first co-operative energy project on UK rail network

The new initiative is expected to save up to 50 tonnes of carbon a year, generating over 200,000 kW hours of electricity. Read more…

Transport for Wales introduce more services to timetable

Transport for Wales (TfW) have announced there will be an increase in the number of services running on its network from December this year. Read more…

A sustainable new vision for the future of Scottish railways is on track

Scotland has huge ambition when it comes to greening rail travel. It has set a target date of 2035 for eliminating diesel across its 2820 kilometres of track. Read more…

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Women In Rail was a strong topic at our recent visit to Infrarail 2018 at ExCel London. The skills gap is an increasingly important issue worldwide and it is particularly noticeable in the rail industry, as we heard from Adeline Ginn at Infrarail in her presentation to us about Women In Rail. Here are a few facts and information highlighted from the Women In Rail talk.

Adeline started off her presentation with a quote from Sharmaine Lovegrove ‘If you don’t have a diverse workforce or product, sooner or later you won’t exist’ which really ties in nicely with Advance TRS’s core values as a recruitment company, and also goes with our internal recruitment beliefs.

It is proven that diverse teams work better and give greater innovation and creativity. UK statistics are as follows with women on the Board of Directors:

  • 42% higher return on sales in the UK
  • 66% higher return on invested capital
  • 53% higher return on equity

The perception of rail as a masculine industry has been identified as a big impact factor preventing women from joining the sector. Women seem to fall into rail by accident rather than by choice. Engineering is often a misunderstood role and girls as young as 7 years old have an unconscious bias misconception of rail. This is where Women In Rail are keen to make a change, helping children at a young age understand the sector fully before misconception sets in.

Here are some more surprising figures we gained from Adeline:

  • 16.4% of the workforce are women
  • 78% of this number are in non-manager roles
  • 2% are senior managers
  • 4% are engineers

Some challenges that Women In Rail have noticed and want to help change are Working practices (women might need flexible working and not long days) and recruitment targeting men.

Women In Rail have already started many initiatives to help with this, including a mentoring programme, networking events, networking platform, campaigns, an online hub for women and many others.

This year, they celebrated their first Women In Rail Awards which was a great success with over 130 attendees from across the rail industry. It showcased individuals, teams and companies (large or small) who in the last 5 years have done amazing work to improve gender balance, diversity and inclusion in the UK railway industry. We look forward to seeing the continued growth and success of this!

Advance TRS are committed to supporting diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We are careful to check for bias in our job adverts to ensure that women are not excluded. Within the recruitment sector, we realise that women and men even look at job adverts differently. If a job advert is published, sometimes it can be directed towards men just by the simple wording, which could put a woman off straight away and they may disregard it.

We believe in delivering the very best candidates for our clients. By excluding 50% of the workforce, you may miss out on the best person for the job. So it is our job to make sure we are including absolutely everyone possible into our candidate searches.

Explore our latest jobs here.

Some of the Advance TRS team had a chance to take a trip to Infrarail which was held at ExCel London between the 1st-3rd May this year. Infrarail is firmly established as Britain’s leading showcase for every aspect of railway infrastructure technology and expertise, with a strong reputation for attracting visiting managers, engineers and buyers at the highest level.

The marketing team travelled there on the 1st May and managed to sit in on a talk from Chris Grayling which was fantastic. He spoke about the strategy for the railway including passengers and freight. The general progress of the rail industry as a whole including expanding the UK network and plans to build overseas presence. He also spoke about the the current situations of Crossrail, HS2, CP6, North-South Line, Old Oak Common, Transplan upgrate, East-West Rail and Ealing North Junction. He then spoke about the plans for the next 5 years for rail.

After his speech, he then proceeded to answer a few questions from those who were in the audience. We have a video of his talk on our twitter page which we recorded live, if you want to have a listen you can click here.

Adeline Ginn, the founder of Women In Rail, presented in the Knowledge hub in the afternoon. It was great to hear her presentation which explained to us how she started Women In Rail on LinkedIn 5 years ago and how big this has now become.

She spoke about how having more women in the rail industry would help improve the business of rail by increasing return on sales, increasing return on invested capital and increasing return on equity. At the moment, only 16.4% of the rail workforce are women.

The company provide all sorts of support for women in the industry from networking events and a networking platform, to a mentoring programme and a professional algorithm and set up. We know how passionate she is about this and how much she believes in women having a platform to meet other professionals who understand exactly where they are coming from.

Both of these talks were inspiring and are keeping us up to date with what is going on in the rail industry!