12 Nov 2024

People Spotlight: Phil Ellingworth

Phil received the 2024 Australasian Rail Industry (ARI) Career Achievement Award in recognition of over 42 years of dedicated service and significant contributions to the rail industry.

At Metro Trains Melbourne (MTM), Phil is responsible for assuring all technical aspects of MTM’s operations is in accordance with rail safety national law. He leads a team of around 200 engineers and 25 graduates across a multitude of specialities, including track, civil, structural, electrical, signalling and rolling stock engineering.

Phil has practical, hands-on experience in delivering complex engineered solutions into multi–disciplinary rail infrastructure environments together with extensive experience and knowledge of contemporary and appropriate capacity enhancing technologies for mainline, heavy haul and metro rail environments across England, Australia, and the Asia Pacific Region.

He is a qualified Chartered Engineer and Professional Signal Engineer by background, and is recognised as an EngExec with Engineers Australia, a credential that recognises pre-eminent individuals in executive positions who have shown exceptional leadership and talent.

We asked Phil to reflect on his career, how he has seen the approach to safety evolve and what advice he has for young rail professionals.

1. What is it about the rail sector that has kept you in it for the past 42 years?

• Every job has brought new challenges which have built on prior experience. No job, or day for that matter, has ever been the same.
• Overall, the rail engineering sector comprises a small community of high quality professionals. The people I have worked alongside across many countries through my career have been incredible, inspirational and colleagues with whom I have shared great experiences. The connections made transcend who we work for and lifelong friendships and acquaintances have been made.
• Rail continues to adapt and grow from strength to strength – it makes it interesting, challenging but leverages core safety principles which act as key foundations for thinking about problems and the multiplicity of solutions that emerge.

 

2. How have you seen the approach to safety evolve during your time in the rail?

• The foundations of my safety understanding were strongly formed in the UK and were especially shaped following the terrible events of the Clapham Junction rail disaster in 1988. The transformation of the railway signalling environment in the UK that followed established the basis for so many changes to the industry, including at a global level, and continue to be applied and relevant in today’s context.
• Strong foundations in railway signalling over more than three decades have enabled me to transition to a far broader portfolio across all rail engineering discipline areas as Chief Engineer for MTM.
• I think that the evidentiary basis for demonstrating or assuring safety has become far more stringent and is increasingly guided by international standards. This has brought increasing portability of safety professionals but the need for experienced, competent subject matter experts to provide the underpinning technical basis for safety arguments should not be under-estimated.
• Structure has brought a more common language around assurance, safety cases along with and intense debates over the meaning of terms such as ‘safe so far as is reasonably practicable’ from a rail safety national law perspective. There is no absolute answer to the question is it safe SFAIRP but through demonstration, structured arguments and documented evidence the case can be made that a system is safe and can be relied upon to carry the thousands of people who implicitly rely upon the decisions we make as professional engineers.

 

3. What are the big challenges that you foresee the sector facing in the coming decades?

• In the competition for investment in railways the value for money challenge is ever present. This rightfully drives innovation across all sectors including rail. As an industry we are incredibly conservative which is both a blessing and a curse. Our ability to bring new innovations into the sector and deliver the cost and performance benefits is frankly quite challenged and needs strong advocates to secure the benefits and improve our overall competitiveness. Leveraging global and or Australian standards is important in this regard as opposed to thinking of our local context as being especially unique and thus driving cost into our solutions. The concept of customisation of products for a local context as opposed to their being specially modified for us is important if we are to gain the benefit of global scale from our principal system suppliers. Such an approach demands a ‘modify the business’ rather than ‘modify the product’ mindset which is easily said but proves to be incredibly challenging to deliver.
• The Australian rail industry is currently developing its thinking and approach to the adoption of the European Train Control System (ETCS) across the National Network for Interoperability. This is important and should be transformational for rail harmonisation across the country. It takes genuine vision and commitment to make this a success. All parties, whether they be federal, state, owners, operators & maintainers, and suppliers need to work together to make such a vision a success. Finding a way that the cost equation, where costs and benefits may not be in-balance, can be made to work at the local operator level in the interest of delivering a broader national outcome will be essential to this quest. It will not be an easy journey and taking care to ensure that leveraging standardisation from a European context, without demanding bespoke adaptations will take strong leadership at all levels.

 

4. Advise for those forging a career in rail.

• The rail industry has been personally incredibly rewarding.
• Knowledge and experience are critical to share with our young emerging engineers and engineering leaders.
• So often we do things in this industry because we have always done them that way – we constantly need to seek to understand the ‘why’ so we can make well considered decisions regarding changes to systems. When the ‘why’ is understood we need to bottle it, write it down so our requirements in the form of standards can capture that knowledge.
• Documenting our knowledge, in standards is vital but making our standards reflect the functional outcomes that are required as opposed to being prescriptive is a pathway to support innovation. Finding ways to take our standards up to a national level and or better still, where appropriate, an international level is a really important philosophy. The importance of having a wise voice at the table that can represent the Australian context should not be under-estimated – we have a lot of alternate perspectives to offer, delivered through bitter and rewarding experience.