New book dispels gender stereotypes
A few years ago I decided to take a career side-step, going part-time as a mechanical building services engineer while attempting to forge a career as a children's author. My debut picture book, Pink Trucks, is due to be released in April. It has been beautifully illustrated by Cory Reid and is being published by Five Quills.
I feel that both my part-time role, and the content of my picture book, closely align with the IMechE's stance on gender equality in engineering. I have long thought that one of the key issues in engineering is the lack of people in senior roles, particularly men, working part-time. This, in my opinion, has the consequence of inferring that to get to senior positions you have to work full-time, which has obvious implications when engineers decide they want to start a family. I was lucky enough to take extensive periods of paternity leave with both my children which enabled my wife to return to progress her career earlier.
My book, Pink Trucks, is aimed at dispelling gender stereotypes from a young age, in a fun, relatable, STEM-themed way for children. The story follows a young boy, who loves trucks but also the colour pink, and his journey to try to find a pink truck. The book concludes (spoiler alert!) with him making his own pink truck after being unable to find one otherwise. You can read more about it on www.fivequills.co.uk/product/pink-trucks/
Sam Clarke
Covid to blame for HS2 failure
I believe that the biggest thing that went wrong with HS2 was Covid. It ruined government finances by requiring vast payments for furlough, and demolished the credibility of HS2 by raising expectations that everyone would work from home. However, the latest figures for London Overground, for example, show ridership at 96% of pre-pandemic levels.
The promoters of HS2 stressed the benefits of slightly reduced journey tomes for passengers, but a great deal of the potential benefit from the full line to Manchester was in modal shift of freight from road to rail, with consequent environmental benefits. This will now be impossible because of bottlenecks between Birmingham and Manchester – rail freight thrives on long-distance transport.
Non-technical people tend to believe that wiring up motorways with overhead power lines for HGVs would be cheap and simple. Unfortunately, cost and timing overruns on rail electrification show that this is not true. Hydrogen-powered trains and trucks are another idea which is unrealistic at scale in the short term.
It was a mistake to build the London end of HS2 first, especially to the out-of-town terminus at Old Oak Common. This was, however, inevitable, as MPs much prefer to invest in projects that they can see on a day trip from Westminster. Sadly, this south of England focus allowed Nimbys to demand hugely expensive tunnels under the Chilterns.
I strongly believe that engineers should not bear the brunt of the blame for this fiasco. They built what they were told to build.
Ken Strachan, Nuneaton, Warwickshire
Capital ideas
I would have continued with HS2 phase 2a to Crewe and terminated the current construction there rather than at Handsacre. However, my long-term plan would have been to continue the railway to Edinburgh via Preston and Carlisle.
I would agree with the Prime Minister that the Manchester and East Midlands Hub spur lines should not be built. I hope that HS2 will eventually reach Edinburgh and join the capitals of England and Scotland.
Kenneth Barnsley
Design freezes are essential
The statement within your article on curtailing HS2 that “as anyone involved in project management knows, redesigning a project as it is built is most likely to add costs” needs elaboration (Industry Pulse, Professional Engineering No 4, 2023).
When a project must be completed on time and on budget to deliver net positive value a design freeze is essential. Redesigning as it is built is a leading indicator of project management failure.
Eur Ing Brian Edmonds, Farnham, Surrey
Enormous challenges
The challenges of energy transition to get net-zero greenhouse gases (GHG) by 2050 are enormous. Using data from www.energyinst.org/statistical-review, in 2022, for the UK, fossil fuels provided 5.47 exajoules (EJ) of energy. To replace even 60% of current fossil-fuel use, the rest assumed to come from efficiency improvements and societal changes, the UK will need to build new continuous carbon-free power generation capacity of 104GW in the next 25 years. This is equivalent to 35 new nuclear power stations of the size of Hinkley Point C or 260,000 wind turbines of 1MW capacity, assuming a much-improved capacity factor, CF, of 0.4 (current value for CF is 0.32 for wind).
In addition, livestock farming, aviation, steel and cement industries need to be essentially shut down and an enormous new energy infrastructure has to be built while safely dismantling the existing one.
However, the UK accounts for only 1.1% of global fossil-fuel use which shows no sign reduction as energy demand increases in large countries like China and India and the rest of the developing economies. So there is little prospect of global GHG coming down sufficiently and we have no choice but to adapt to the consequences of any future warming.
Humanity has coped very well with a warming of about 1.2C over the past century – every measure of human wellbeing has improved significantly in spite of a quadrupling of the population. So we should be optimistic that we can similarly adapt to future warming through technology and human ingenuity. In any case we will have to; there is no choice.
There needs to be far more focus to make societies more resilient to the consequences of future warming rather than on trying to meet made-up targets which will have little impact on global GHG levels. Every technology relevant to energy use needs to be continuously improved and sensibly implemented – no single approach can work. Engineers will have to play a central role in this endeavour.
Professor Gautam Kalghatgi, Oxford
The joy of model railways
Pete Waterman is right: children are captivated by model railways. I spent a whole day talking engineering to all the children in every class in a primary school, ending by letting them all view and operate one of my exhibition model railways. They are indeed spellbound and so are their teachers. It seems that knowledge of engineering and model railways is limited across the school. It’s not on the syllabus, said the teachers. “It’s so cool,” said the young. A golden opportunity for Hornby and others to market their products more widely to this age and for engineering bodies to reduce the age at which they approach schools. In my day on the IMechE council it was 16. Do any readers have similar experiences?
Roddy Mullin, London
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.