UK: UKRIA Award Nominees

Image courtesy of Amberg Technologies

The UK Rail Industry Awards will take place on 11 February 2016 in London at a black tie event celebrating the best and brightest of the UK rail industry.

Thales are nominated for the Apprenticeship Development Scheme award for their Thales and Prospects Advanced Technology apprenticeship programme, which began in 2013, and currently has 54 apprentices.

Unipart Dorman are up for the Product Innovation and Service Innovation awards. The former is for their LEDs in rail signals, of which 110,000 modules are in use across the UK’s rail network. A 2015 Network Rail SigMod review found that many of those modules do not require maintenance checks, improving savings and safety.

The latter award is for Unipart’s offsite factory. The recognition comes following their material supply to customers benefited from an investment in facilities and the creation of a safe, reliable and economically viable option for their customers.

Unipart are also nominated for the coveted Traction and rolling stock award for their coordination between their engineering, procurement, customer service and marketing departments to deliver a cohesive, cost-effective solution for rolling stock issues including reliability, performance and innovation.

Atkins have been recognised in the Training and Development and Young Rail Professional, in the former for the 55 UK graduate engineers who have been trained to become signalling engineers by way of a proactive programme of outreach to colleges and ongoing training and development programmes.

Mohanakrishnan Sarvepalli of Atkins has been nominated for the Young Rail Professional of 2015, who joined Atkins as a trainee at just 19 years old. He has risen to become technical lead for Cardiff Area Resignalling Renewals. His performance has been described as “phenomenal”.

Amberg Technologies have been nominated in the Product Innovation category for their high precision manual surveying technology. This IMU technology has replaced the tachymeter to measure track geometry, thereby reducing man power on the track by 50%.

Amberg Technologies said:

“We are delighted to be shortlisted and are looking forward to present our revolutionary Amberg IMS – the first and only one-trolley long-chord system based on IMU technology.”

The projects up for awards will be judged on criteria including planning and execution, innovation and creativity and the success of the outcome, where individuals will be judged on their merits and successes.