Presidential Lecture

16th June 2020

"Techniques at the forefront of system safety and their application to railway signalling"

Dr Yuji Hirao will present the first Presidential series lecture on 16th June. The video will be made available online from 00:00 UK time on the 16th allowing plenty of time to view the lecture before a live Q&A session in the evening at 19:20 UK time.

Full joining details available soon on our events page.

IRSE News June 2020

May's IRSE News is now available online.  

It includes features on Traffic Management by past President John Francis; a new instalment of the Back to Basics series from David Nicholson and ​"It's only a relic" sees the return of Ruth, first seen in issue 250.

The Convention committee and IRSE North American local section are working hard to reschedule the convention for 2021 in Toronto

Update for those with 2020 hotel reservations in Canada following Convention postponement

Many of you may have booked to stay at the Marriott in Toronto on the original 2020 dates. 

The latest update from the Marriott Group advises that guests with existing reservations for any future arrival date, including reservations with pre-paid rates that are typically more restrictive, will be allowed to make full changes or cancellations without a charge up to 24 hours prior to arrival, so long as the change or cancellation is made by June 30, 2020.

Professional exam – October 2020

After due deliberation, the IRSE Education & Professional Development Committee  has decided that the Professional Examination held every year at centres across the world in October will take place as normal on 3 October where Covid-19 guidelines permit.  

If necessary the Exam will be cancelled at short notice at those regional centres where restrictions are still in place.   See here for full details including news about the exciting new stand-alone Module A ‘Certificate in Railway Control engineering Fundamentals’ qualification available for the first time this year.

IRSE Members' Lunch

With regret, Council have taken the decision to cancel the Members' Lunch for 2020 as a result of the current public health emergency.

Harvinder Bhatia is  a professional engineer and business leader with extensive knowledge of both mainline and metro systems gained over a 25 year career in the railway industry. He serves on both the IRSE membership and London and South East section committees.

He is currently head of central engineering at Transport for London (TfL) managing many specialist teams including systems engineering, system performance, telecoms and digital engineering.

He joined  London Underground in 1989  working in variety of telecom related roles before joining Railtrack (now Network Rail)  in 1999 where he managed the National Telecoms Specialist team. 

At  Network Rail he was part of the National ERTMS Signalling Development Programme where he was the lead on defining the technical communications requirements for the signalling application and took part in European working groups to define the digital specifications for packet switching to support ETCS. 

Harvinder was appointed head of ICT engineering back at Transport for London in 2015.

Robert Cooke is a railway signalling engineer with over 29 years of experience. He is chairman of the IRSE Singaporean section a member of the IRSE International Technical Committee and chairman of the ASPECT committee.

He started his career with London Underground on the Central Line resignalling and Jubilee Line Extension projects.

At Invensys Rail (now Siemens) he worked on the generic principles of the Distance to Go Radio system now deployed on London Underground’s Victoria Line. After helping Invensys win the Downtown Line signalling contract, he moved to Singapore as the onshore Technical Authority for the project utilising Sirius Communications Based Train Control (CBTC) configured as a driverless unattended system.

He then joined the LTA in Singapore where he was involved in the NSEW resignalling and the new Thomson Line, both of which are using CBTC technology. He is currently deputy chief specialist, signalling with responsibilities for R&D, technical advice & professional development. He is a chartered engineer in Singapore with the IES and serves on the Railway Systems Sub-committee.