In this episode, we chat with James Mansell, Engineering Manager for Downer’s Rail and Transit Systems team in Cardiff, NSW. James shares his career journey from intern to manager at Downer, and provides insights into the rich history and current operations of Downer’s Cardiff facility. He discusses recent innovations like their new Electronic Test and Repair Centre, as well as ongoing projects like the bogey overhaul program. James offers his perspective on the advantages of working in rail manufacturing in Newcastle, market changes in the industry, and advice for those looking to enter the field. He also shares his thoughts on the future of rail, including trends towards local manufacturing, decarbonization, and improved use of data. This episode provides a fascinating look into the rail industry in Australia and the opportunities it presents for engineers and manufacturers.

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Please note this transcript has been auto-generated and may contain some errors,

Thanks for joining me at the NewyTechPeople Engineering podcast. My name is Mel Seitsma. I’m the senior engineering consultant in the team here.

And today I had the pleasure of chatting with James Mansell, who’s the engineering manager for the rail and transit systems team at Downer. Thanks for having me. You’re welcome.

Thanks for coming on. So, James, I guess I’d love to share your career journey to date. Could you share an overview of your current role and how you got to where you are? Yeah.

Okay. So like you said, I’m the engineering manager for Downer rail and transit systems. So I’m based in our facility over at Cardiff, but I look after the team in Cardiff, which is about 15 to 20 technical staff.

So engineers, designers, as well as our team in our East Preston facility in Victoria. So what we do in Cardiff is we do primarily heavy maintenance for Sydney trains. So that can be overhauls on their fleets that they.

That we can’t do out of our Auburn facility in Sydney. It can be repairs and modifications. And then we’re also trying to re enter the freight market which Downer rail exited a few years ago.

And then in east Preston, what we do is the refurbishment of light rail vehicles on behalf of Yarra tram. Okay. Yeah.

Cool. Nice and diversified. Yeah, yeah.

Lots of different things. Yeah, yeah. So you know where I fit into the team.

So I primarily help with the delivery engineering projects. So that can be, you know, obtaining resources, allocating resources, different tasks, helping them prioritize the work, you know, liaising with stakeholders, internal or external, managing budgets for engineering projects. Yeah, yeah.

Awesome. And how did you get to this point of working for downr? Yeah, so I actually started for downr as a graduate, as an intern, actually. So when I was finishing uni, I applied for a couple of different grad programs and I went with, I got a couple of offers and I ended up going with Downer because I thought that they sort of represented the best development opportunities and the best sort of future pipeline of work that was the most appealing to me in that time.

Did a couple of different roles. So went through the Downer grad program where I did some work at Kuragang island for freight, developing technical maintenance plants for locomotives. Did a stint in our major projects team, working on the Sydney growth trains design and delivery, and then went on to the Waratah bogey overhaul after that.

Following that, stayed at the Carter facility. After I finished the Waratah bogey overhaul, did other major CCO, so component change out projects, became project engineer, lead project engineer, and then a few years ago became engineering manager. That’s awesome.

I think it’s really impressive. You know, an organisation can help you with that career growth along the way. Yes, well, yeah, I’ve been given plenty of opportunities, and I think I’ve done okay.

I mean, they haven’t got rid of me yet. Very good. And did you go to uni locally? Yeah, yeah.

So I went to. I went to the University of Newcastle. So, yeah, I was, you know, born in Maitland, grew up in Curry, went to.

Went to school in the area, went to Newcastle uni. So I wanted to stay local because, you know, I love the area and all my family’s here, so. Yeah, awesome.

That’s great to hear. It’s good to hear that there’s opportunities for people, I think, to progress through all those parts of their career locally as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah, yeah.

Why did you decide to get into engineering to start with? Well, you know, I went through high school and sort of, you know, as I approached uni, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I. When I was gonna grow up, but I was always into physics in particular, but, you know, the. The different stem subjects, so science and maths was more appealing to me than things like English, et cetera.

Engineering in particular, I think, represented some pretty strong career prospects in terms of applying that in a real world role. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s where I’ve gone from there to work on project delivery.

I sort of have started to enjoy the soft skills a little bit more, and engineering’s actually a pretty good way to do that, because in larger projects, it’s a lot about working with other stakeholders on the project. So project managers or financial controllers, safety people, production staff, senior management. So, yeah, enjoyed that.

And your discipline is mechanical engineering. Mechanical engineering, yeah. Once again, I think it’s always good for listeners, especially people that are looking into engineering, to kind of go, yep, I can do what James did and study mechanical engineering and go through that journey as well.

Yeah. Cool. So, obviously, the site out at Cardiff has been around for a long time and has quite a history out there.

If my research is correct. I think it started operating in the 1920s. Yeah.

So could you maybe share with us a bit of a snapshot of the history and evolution of that site? Yeah, okay. Yeah, the site has definitely got character. It opened in 1928, I believe, so it’s nearly 100 years old.

Yeah. It’s been used for a few different things, but primarily rolling stock, manufacture and maintenance through the years. So open in 1928 to work on steam locomotives primarily.

At one stage, the workforce was up to about 1200 people. Yeah, it sort of formed its own community there. So there was a bowling team, a cricket team, there was a brass band, a choir, lots of things like that.

And you can sort of still see some of the remnants of the heritage across the site. So you can go and find the bowling green or the shed where they made the dog spikes for the rail. You know, through the sixties and seventies, they sort of moved into diesel locomotive work.

And then it sort of started to decline a little bit up into the early nineties. Was really disused for a couple of years in the mid nineties there. And then it was Edi who had purchased Clyde engineering, won the later became downer.

Edi won the Millennium train contract, and that was to be delivered out of the Carter facility. I think it was in 1999, they moved into the facility, upgraded the facility to get ready to deliver that build project. And then from there, there have been a few other things going through, so that could be the GT 46 C ace locomotive assembly or the Waratar train build that we did through there and now.

Yeah. Like I said, primarily used for. As a back shop for maintenance.

Yeah. And Waratah has been the most recent kind of key project. Yeah.

So Waratah was a pretty significant project for Downer to deliver out of there because that was partial assembly locally. So there’s the. What we call the Waratah series two, or sometimes referred to as the SGT project or the b sets that were commissioned out of Cardiff.

So they were built in China, and we commissioned those out at Cardiff. And that was around 2017. Yeah.

Lots of different projects through the years. And I guess if you kind of reflect back probably outside of the steelworks and things like that, potentially one of the bigger employers in the region at times when it’s history. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, certainly. Certainly in its heyday when it’s over a thousand people, then, you know, during a Waratah bill, that was several hundred people out of there as well.

So, yeah, it’s been a pretty large employer at different times through its history. Had a big impact, I guess, on lots of local people in the Hunter region. Yeah.

Well, sometimes you talk to people at Cardiff and, you know, they’ll say, oh, my dad or my uncle or, you know, whoever worked here years and years ago. And it’s sort of good to. To sort of see a little snapshot into the history of the place, hearing the anecdotes some of those people have.

Yeah. Yeah. I love the backstory so, very cool.

And I guess in more recent times with the site, obviously in the press recently, was your electronic test and repair centre being recently, I guess, opened by the New South Wales premier. Could you share with us a little bit about that centre out there? Yeah, sure. So, like I was saying, Cardiff gets primarily used for maintenance for the Sydney trains fleet.

So we’ve got all this electronic equipment that is used to control traction equipment and electrical supply equipment, things of that nature, and some of that equipment is coming due for overhaul. And then there’s also a corrective maintenance component of the three life support for those components as well. So as we were approaching, approaching that twelve year overhaul of those components, we needed to develop a little bit of additional capability to put ourselves in a position where we could overhaul that equipment.

So you’ve got two options with that equipment, and it can be to go and replace the equipment with new, or it can be to go and re qualify the equipment. Re qualifying the equipment is preferable because from a project delivery standpoint, it provides you a little bit more flexibility in terms of radiable pool sizes, and it also has a positive environmental impact as well, because you’re not just throwing away all that e waste. So, yeah, we developed the electronic test and repair center, which we call the ETRC, and we’ll remove the components from the train.

We’ll have rotable pools, so put requalified components back on the train so we can return it the service quickly. And from there we’ll put the component through a series of tests and we may need to do some type of on condition replacement of sub components, or we may replace that component based on what we find through that testing and requalification. That’s really cool, because I think there is such a big focus in manufacturing and lots of industries at the moment in that kind of circular economy piece and reusing things where possible.

Yeah. Yeah. So we went through another overhaul pretty recently on our ten year Waratara overhaul.

Wherever we’re in a similar situation for something not quite as complicated as electronic control boards for traction equipment, where the fire retardant chemical on the seating was reaching its end of life. And we’re in a position where we needed to replace the foam and the fabric of the seat backs and bases. And we were sort of in a position where we could either buy the entire assembly, you know, from, from somewhere like China, or we could engage a supplier to, to help us replace that.

So what we did is we re qualified the plastic backing, we bought new foam and fabric, and we sent that through to a supplier called corrective service industries. So went out to Cessnock jail, and what they. What they did is they’ve got a working group there and helps people sort of prepare to re enter the workforce.

So rather than throwing the entire assembly out, we just replaced the life expired components. And that was a bit of a good news story as well, because that allowed us to go and recycle the foam, and that can get used in a variety of different applications. That foam is used in, like, carpet underlay and things like that and significantly reduce the waste.

And there’s a bit of a good news story in helping rehabilitate different people. Yeah, they’re a really good supplier as well. Yeah.

That’s like a nice way to kind of, in your eye, maybe giving back to the hunter community. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that project really worked out quite well, and that was a bit of a success story, that project, so, yeah, awesome. Are there any other key manufacturing, I guess, expertise areas that happen out of the Cardiff site that you’d like to share with us? One of the big major periodic maintenance programs that we deliver out of Cardiff is the bogey overhaul project. So we’ve recently started that project.

So this time around, we’re doing what we call the three fleet bogey overhaul program, where we’re doing the Millennium fleet and then the a and the b sets as well. So that’s about 2200 bogeys that we’ll put through there. Yeah, it’s quite a.

Quite a significant project and a lot of preparation work. So we’ll prepare for that work, you know, about. About two years out, and we’ll do things like, you know, prepare our supply chain because there’ll be parts that we’ll need to get from, you know, all over the world, gear up our workforce, do training, prepare our instructions, optimize the workflow, things of that nature.

Something we did a little bit differently for this overhaul than we’ve done for the previous overhaul is we installed a new gearbox overhaul facility as well. For the last overhaul, what we did was we sent those gearboxes to a supplier in Wollongong to overhaul those, which was quite a bit of double handling because I had to go on a truck this time around. We worked with that supplier to develop the capability in house, and that was sort of a really good value add for that particular project because it allowed us to deliver it faster, allowed us to have more control over the quality, more visibility over what exactly is happening.

And, yeah, it’s significantly reduced the carbon impact of that project as well, because we’re nothing trucking these gearboxes around unnecessarily. And just even that supply chain time, isn’t it, on getting it to and fro. Yeah.

So for the previous overhaul, we had quite a large rotable pool because we’re doing a couple of different fleets this time. We need to manage a few different rotable pools in parallel. So, yeah, it introduced sort of another variable that we.

That we needed to manage. And this was a really good answer to that problem. Awesome.

Yeah. I guess as far as looking at Downr group in the Newcastle region, obviously there’s more that they do than just rail. They’re really well known and respected for that vast capability across the whole Downer group.

Could you share with us maybe some of the other capabilities that Downr have locally? Yeah, sure. So there’s Newcastle transport that is operated by Keyolis Downer. So a joint venture that we’re in with Keolis and, you know, probably most famously that operates Newcastle light rail, where Kiolis does the operations.

And downer sort of specialises in the maintenance of those light rail vehicles. And then there’s a few other things as well. So there’s the asphalt plant and Terrelba.

There’s an office in Hexham that offers a variety of technical services. So, for example, an infrastructure upgrade at the raft base was recently delivered. So, yeah, a few different things in Newcastle area.

Very good. So I think you cross like infrastructure range. I guess that affects everyone locally.

Like your NBN. Yeah, yeah. Through to, I guess, infrastructure across, you know, energy.

And you still in the mining area? No, not so much in mining anymore. Certainly do have a presence at Bayswater power stations doing the work that they do out there. Our downer rts actually provide some support for documentation management for army power stations as well.

Yeah. And then like you said, there’s the team supporting the NBN out of. Out of Hexham as well.

Yeah. Cool. Hey, quick pause in your episode.

You’ll be back to normal listening within a minute. James McDonald here, director at newly tech people here to just announce that these podcasts are actually brought to you in collaboration with the Hunter Manufacturing Awards. And a quick update from Jackie Daley, the chair of the Hunter Manufacturing Awards, to let you know what’s happening.

Thank you, James. Just want to do a big shout out to newey tech people. They have come on board this year as our technology partner and we certainly couldn’t run these awards programs without our sponsors.

So thank you for your commitment to engineering and manufacturing in the region. The Hunter Manufacturing awards are happening over the next couple of months. Applications are currently open.

We have 14 amazing categories that you can apply for. Awards cover categories such as Rising Star, Apprentice of the year. We talk about product design, innovation, marketing, sustainability in the workplace.

So there’s a whole range of different categories you can apply for. If you are a manufacturer in the region, you have until the 21 August to apply, so visit hma.org dot au to get your application processing.

Look forward to seeing you now back to normal listening. What would you consider to be the advantages of working in the rail manufacturing industry in Newcastle? There are a few. So there’s a pretty strong history of rail manufacturing in Newcastle.

I sort of spoke about what’s happened at the Carter facility before and then, you know, there have been other train built in Newcastle as well. You know, over the last few decades in particular, there are some people that have really developed quite a bit of knowledge that people entering the industry or more recent to the industry can really get a lot of knowledge from. There’s also a very strong supply chain in the area as well, where there are some good suppliers that are quite well set up to support the work that we do in the rail industry.

And then just generally, the culture of the Newcastle area is a pretty good match for work of this nature as well, I think. I guess market changes have affected a lot of people in the Newcastle area. Yeah.

Could you chat about market changes in your space? Yeah. So in the last, sort of, you know, ten years or so, it seems like it’s improving a bit, really heading in the. In the right direction, I think.

Carter facility, like I was saying, there’s quite a bit of work that we do in the maintenance space and then, you know, the government also signalling that they want to do a local build in the future as well. So, yeah, it’s definitely, definitely improving. Was that the Tangara fleet? Yeah, so, yeah, they’re talking about replacing the Tangara fleet.

So, you know, notionally, the Tangara fleets are pretty large fleet, so you’d anticipate to replace that. That would be a reasonably large build contract. Yeah.

And would that be something where you’d need to kind of ramp up numbers to cover? Yeah, for sure, yeah. So it would be really, really good for downer, obviously, to get a job like that, but then also really good for the entire industry in Newcastle, for the region, because it’d be tertiary impacts of a build like that happening locally. Significant opportunities, both in terms of white collar, to sort of do that transfer of knowledge I was talking about before, or blue collar for apprentices to develop and do this heavy manufacturing stuff that we haven’t been able to do for a few years.

And it would also sort of mean a pretty significant step forward in terms of manufacturing passenger vehicles out of Newcastle as well. So it’s been some time since a project like that was delivered out of Newcastle, and an opportunity like that, you’d sort of redevelop and reset up that capability and be prepared to deliver projects like that in future for the next build after that. Yeah.

So this would be, if I understand it, the first time in a long time that you would be doing the full breadth of a project, from design manufacturing through to commissioning. So down has done projects like that before. So there was the millennium build contract in the early two thousands where we did that in other states.

We can look at what we’ve got going on with the HCMT that was built locally and that was assembled, commissioned down in Victoria. There’s the QTMP project that we’re doing in Queensland. So that’s brand new trains for the 2032 Olympics that we’re delivering for the Queensland government.

So we’ve done projects like that recently. But a Tangara replacement would be a really good opportunity for New South Wales and Newcastle in particular, I think. And I guess while we’re talking about some, I guess, changes where we are now, I guess there was a while in the past where some of maybe the offshore manufacturing or the offshore contracts affected the local rail industry.

Yeah. So in the rail industry, I was reading an article the other day and it was talking about a locomotive that was imported from between the US and the UK in the 18 hundreds or something. So it’s happened for a long time, but we sort of.

There’s some components that are quite specialized and you would sort of need to import them to get the best products. Traction equipment is pretty often imported from Japan, or you may get things like brake calipers and couplers imported from a country like Germany, say, where I think offshore manufacturing comes into it is it sort of introduces an additional variable that you need to optimize, depending on what the buyer wants. So, for example, you may import some traction equipment from Japan, but then, you know, what assembly can you do locally in terms of actually building it or commissioning it, testing it? If you import, say, a gearbox from Europe, for a gearbox, you’ve got an axle, you’ve got your wheels, you’ve got your bearings, and then the gearbox kit itself to assemble onto the axle.

So you need to sort of optimize a piece there where at what stage do we cut in the australian manufacturing piece into that as well? So it’s just another variable that you need to manage to try and reach the optimized solution that sort of suits the client best in terms of what their priorities are for a project. So I think that’s how that comes into it for what we do. Yeah.

Are the australian standards different? Do they differ a great deal to Germany or Japan? Yeah. So, I mean, we’ve got local standards for the rolling stock industry in Australia, certainly the risby set of standards. And then, you know, individual operators, state to state, will have their own requirements as well that may be driven by their state governing bodies or what their requirements are for that particular piece of rolling stock.

So, you know, it’s sort of always a very bespoke design that needs to be delivered anyway. Okay. I guess in today’s manufacturing environment, innovation is really critical for staying ahead.

Can you share with us some of the innovation or technology that you’re using at the moment in rail in particular? The industry’s a little bit famous, or maybe infamous for being a little bit slow to adopt a chai, which is a good thing, because rail is a very safe method of transport, and it needs to remain that way. In the work that we do at Downer, what it can mean is delivering maintenance in a more efficient way. So some examples that we could talk about would be the ETRC that we’ve recently delivered out of Cardiff, the gearbox insourcing that we did out of Cardiff as well.

One of our technology strategy engineers in Melbourne recently developed a cleaning robot to automate the cleaning of seats and floors of our trains that we maintain. It’s pretty cool in Melbourne. Yeah.

So things of that nature are some pretty good examples of innovations that we do on our maintenance contracts. You know, engineers typically are, you know, pretty. Pretty innovative.

They want to be creative. So, you know, if you just provide them opportunities to sort of come up with these ideas, take them seriously, and allow them to be a business case. You know, we’re pretty, pretty fortunate at Downer at the moment where if someone puts together a coherent business case and can demonstrate that it makes sense and there’s going to be opportunities to doing that, I can’t say that, you know, that would.

That would not be supported, so. Yeah, yeah. So I think if people can see that, engineers can see that, you know, their ideas being taken seriously, they’ll sort of naturally come up with these things.

That’s great, though, as far as, even if you kind of look at reasons for working with downr and maintaining staff. Like, if you can have a big impact on a project like that, that’s pretty cool as well. Yeah.

Yeah. So I guess now coming back to you as an engineering manager, what advice would you give to other people wanting to enter the industry? You know, the rail industry can be a little bit niche at times. So if you want to enter the industry as a, you know, an experienced professional trying to transition in, just look at the.

Look at the transferable skills that you have. So there have been times where we’ve hired people from outside of the rail industry and they’ve been quite successful moving into what we do. So, you know, those transferable skills can be, you know, things like asset management, providing engineering assurance, root cause investigation.

These are really tangible technical skills that we can move straight over into our industry. So focus on those for people who are sort of graduates trying to enter the industry. Just look for opportunities, look for mentoring, things like that.

Because, like I was saying before, there are some really, really experienced and knowledgeable people in Newcastle in particular that are always, you know, very happy to share their knowledge as well. So just try to. Try to pick up on that if you can.

Yeah. And it sounds like from your experience, internships can go a long way. Yeah.

Yeah. So we’ve. We’ve currently got three graduates at Cardiff right now and we’ve got a.

We’ve got an intern as well. So going through the graduate program was something that I did with Downer not too long ago, and it’s really something that I’m really passionate about giving people opportunities to show what they can do, the right attitude and a graduate can go a really long way. Absolutely.

And if you support them to make sure they can make appropriate technical decisions and they’re going through the right process in terms of providing assurance to our management internally, how we need to go through our processes and our customers then can really add a lot of value. Absolutely. Yeah.

Being a leader involves a lot of personal and continuous growth. Is there a particular standout moment in your career that you’d like to share with us? Yeah. So there was, there was a project that I worked on a couple of years ago where, you know, I was talking before about the Waratah bogey overhaul.

So when we were delivering the first Waratah bogie overhaul, it was at the same time that we were delivering the SgT. The B set trains Waratah series two into service. The bogey overhaul is driven by the amount of kilometres that you do.

So the a sets that were going through their first bogey overhaul and the b sets were looking like for the next arising of the bogey overhaul, the one that we’re starting right now, we’re going to fall due at exactly the same time, which creates a little bit of a capacity problem and then can have, you know, drawbacks for our client, like, you know, potential reduced availability, things like that. Yeah. So it was an initiative that, you know, a lot of people at Downer and at Sydney trains together worked on to optimize the bogey Albert hall interval.

So that involved, you know, quite a bit of data gathering all the way back to the previous bogey overhaul that was taking place, you know, finished up in 2020. We would take components that had reached end of life, do accelerated life testing and condition assessments on those, to first justify a trial for a potential extension to the bogey overhaul interval and then to reassess those components once they had completed a trial. So quite a significant change because we were looking to sort of, you know, introduce an extension of that interval, something, you know, in the order of sort of 25% or so.

Yeah, okay. But we needed to make sure that we’re doing so in a way that wouldn’t have no adverse impacts in terms of, you know, obviously a safety risk, but then also maintainability, availability, things like that as well. Yeah, it was a multi, multi year process, very collaborative with Sydney Trains, had a lot of different aspects of the business working together to do this.

And, you know, I was just, I was one person involved in this project, so, but I was lucky enough to be around when we finally managed to sort of get that approval to implement that, that new interval. And the benefits of that are that we were able to sort of slow down that overhaul process we’re doing. So rather than having to try and push through 2200 bogeys in two and a half to three years, we can do it over a period of closer to three or four years.

That’s got a lot of benefits in terms of our customer having improved availability, more reliable trains on the network for passengers. And then it also allows us to smooth out our labor profile and address that capacity problem that we may have run into had we tried to, had we not gone through the optimization exercise. So, yeah, that was a really, really good project and it sort of was a good match of all the technical hard skills.

So what does this bearing assessment mean? What does this grease assessment need? Really getting down to the weeds with things like that, but then also working with our planning team, working with a client. So it really brought in a lot of the soft skills and the liaising with stakeholders internal and external as well. So that was a really good project and it was great to get it across the line.

So that’s probably one of the highlights. Yeah. I think a couple of times today we kind of, I guess, spoken a little bit about soft skills in the industry.

Is that something you’ve seen as a bit of a shift where it isn’t just so much about technical expertise that engineers are being recognised more for their soft skills? Yeah, for sure. So in a big organization like downr, it’s pretty important. You know, there’s no point being really, really technically capable if you can’t go and communicate that to other people and need to use that information for something, you know, make a, make a major decision about the project.

So it really is quite important that, you know, engineers can communicate well, can, can write well. Yeah, I think you sort of see with, with graduates in particular, new people come into the industry. That’s something where, you know, some of them come out of uni and they can really communicate quite well.

So I think that’s sort of something where we’re moving in the right direction. And obviously the hard skills are important as well, you know, technical analysis skills and analytical skills. But, you know, having those soft skills is really, really quite important and it’s really important for project delivery as well.

Yeah, yeah, I think we see a bit of a difference now in the grads that are coming through and they’re probably the standout ones are the ones that have strong communication skills and things like that. Where do you see the rail industry heading in the next five to ten years? Yeah, so there’s sort of a couple of interesting trends that we’re seeing at the moment. One that we sort of talked about a little bit previously was development of more sort of sovereign manufacturing capability locally.

You can see that happening recently in Victoria, projecting delivery in Queensland, talking about doing that in New South Wales with Tangara replacement and some other things that you see as well, more decarbonisation initiatives. So that can be in the freight space, that can be conversion of fleets from diesel to either hybrid or battery electric locomotives, and in the passenger space, the optimization of electrical equipment. So, you know, things like electrical auxiliary power supplies or h vac units, you know, making rolling stock vehicles physically lighter so they can use less energy, better regeneration of energy.

So you’re recovering that energy and feeding it back to the network. Yeah. And then also improved use of data to improve operations and the optimization of maintenance as well.

A modern train fleet like the Waratah fleet, for example, gets literally millions of signals per day. And it’s just so much that to manually go through and pass that data would be quite a challenge. So there are some opportunities there for data scientists, maybe some applications for things like AI to interpret those signals.

When it comes to optimizing maintenance, you obviously need to manage safety, but then you also to improve availability as much as possible. You want to, you don’t want to over maintain components either. So you can look for signals that you’re getting from the, from the train fleet to determine if a fault is, you know, imminent or at risk of being imminent and then do condition based replacements of different components.

You know, there are, there are huge operational benefits to knowing where a train is in the fleet, how much power it’s drawing. You can get signals to determine how many passengers are on each car. And that’s really, really useful data that can help us as maintainer Sydney trains as an operator.

Or it can be as simple as a passenger at the station can look up at the destination boards and see visually how many people are on each car and pick a car so they can get a seat rather than stand in a walkway. That’s a great idea, especially in PCR and Sydney. So the Waratahs and the SGT’s do that currently.

It’s a pretty good feature. Yeah, that’s a very clever feature because. Yeah, otherwise you’re in sardine kind of hour, aren’t you? Yeah, well it’s sort of a shame if, you know, you’re packed into one car and then there’s one further down where you could get a comfortable seat.

So it’s just the air suspension, it can measure the pressure in each corner of airbags. Based on that pressure you can tell how much mass is, is in that car and from there you can determine how many passengers are in the car. Yeah, that’s super cool.

I like that. Yeah. Yeah, so I guess as far as people that might be interested to work at Downr or, you know, get in contact with yourself, how do we reach you? Yeah, so we’re often hiring, so we’re currently recruiting at Carter for a senior mechanical engineer, often hiring in different areas.

So be that in Auburn north ride where we’re headquartered in Brisbane to deliver the QTMP or down in Victoria. So we’re often advertising for positions. So if that’s, you know, if someone’s keen to work with Downer and they’re interested in the work we’re doing, I’d sort of really encourage them even if they’re new to the rail industry.

Like I said, consider those transferable skills that you may have and, you know, get in contact, put it in an application, and, yeah, it would be really, really keen to get new people into the industry that can bring new skills over. And then in terms of students who are developing, look for opportunities for internships or graduate rotation applications as well. So, like I said, we’ve currently got three graduates at Cardiff, which is pretty good, and one intern, so we often advertise on the unique rehabs.

I normally try to get down to the industry engagement events that they do at the uni. So the careers fair, there’s another one coming up, I think. I think next month that I’ll be participating in as well.

So, yeah, come and say hello and get to meet me and I can tell. Tell them more about what we do and the industry and hopefully bring some talented people into it. Yeah, that sounds great.

So, obviously, people know what you look like now. Yeah. So, yeah.

Awesome. Thanks, James. Appreciate you chatting with us today.

Well, it was really, really good to talk. First time doing a podcast. I hope I did okay, but it was fun, at least.

You did really well. Thanks.