HS2 contractor Balfour Beatty Vinci has opened a training academy at South & City College’s Bordesley Green campus in Birmingham. It is open to everyone, not just those attending the college, and aims to provide local people who are out of work or looking for a career change with the entry level skills they need to secure a broad range of jobs on the West Midlands section of HS2. ‘The Skills Academy will help to ensure that HS2 leaves a lasting skills legacy, and that local people are given every opportunity to be part of this once in a lifetime project that is already transforming the region and supporting its economic recovery from the pandemic’, said Rebecca Young, Skills & Employment Strategy Manager at HS2 Ltd.
Following successful trials in Derbyshire, Schneider Electric has supplied Network Rail with compact power supply points for signalling at Pitlochry, Blackford, Mosspark and Insch. These Compact PPSPs ‘ensure our signalling equipment operates more reliably, and more efficiently’, said Craig MacKenzie of Network Rail. ‘The new kit is smaller, lighter and easier to transport and install. It means we have managed to deliver 80% cost savings and stay on track with our climate commitments by reducing our carbon footprint by 86% compared to the larger version.’
The TSSA union has written to the Chair of the Rail Industry Recovery Group seeking an extension of the employers’ no compulsory redundancy policy, which is due to expire at the end of the year, until at least the end of 2022. ‘It’s crystal clear that although several thousand people have already expressed an interest in voluntary severance, the government’s cuts agenda for our railways is far from over and many more thousands of jobs are due to go’, said TSSA General Secretary Manuel Cortes.
DB Cargo UK has promoted Head of Operations & Service Delivery Neil Ethell to Chief Operating Officer, while Head of Sales Roger Neary has been named Chief Sales Officer, which ‘more accurately reflects his position within the company and wider industry’. CEO Andrea Rossi said ’we are also taking the opportunity to make a number of internal, organisational changes to strengthen links between our Sales and Service Design functions, which I’m confident will make us much more agile and responsive to our customers’ needs’.
Mike Gardner has joined Arcadis from Atkins as UK Station Design Director. ‘Much more than just places to get on and off trains, our expectations of stations are changing rapidly and they have huge potential to help us re-animate our high streets and re-imagine our town and city centres’, he said. ‘We want to be a driving force in this transformation, generating a holistic people-centred approach to designing and delivering great stations’.