‘TRAIN’ING BEGINS FOR RAIL APPRENTICES

Thursday 17 Sep 2009

‘TRAIN’ING BEGINS FOR RAIL APPRENTICES

Region & Route:: National

233 aspiring engineers this week joined Network Rail’s award winning advanced apprentice scheme, becoming part of the latest rail revolution which will see £35bn invested in a bigger and better railway over the next five years.

The young apprentices will spend their first year studying technical, practical and personal development activities at Europe’s largest specialist engineering training centre at HMS Sultan in Gosport, Hampshire. Here they live and work alongside the Royal Navy, sharing state-of-the-art recreation and sports facilities. Apprentices will train as specialists in track, signalling, electrification and plant, or telecoms.

Whilst training at the Gosport centre continues throughout their second and third years, apprentices extend their development by learning on the job at rail engineering depots across Britain, where they are supervised by experienced teams.

With this year’s intake, Network Rail has hired over 1,000 apprentices since its launch in 2005 and will train a further 1,200 over the next five years.

Commenting on the new apprentice intake, Network Rail chief executive, Iain Coucher said: "This is an exciting time to begin working in the rail industry, to train and develop their skills so they can be part of the future of Network Rail. I believe investing in our people is an investment in all our futures, building a better railway and a better skilled Britain."

Notes to editors

Network Rail recently won the Serco Talent Award, in association with the Talent & Enterprise Taskforce, at the annual Business in the Community (BITC) Awards for Excellence. The awards are the UK’s most influential, independent, peer assessed corporate responsibility awards. They recognise and celebrate those companies who have shown innovation, creativity and a sustained commitment to corporate responsibility.

Network Rail will begin recruiting for the 2010 intake in January. Visit http://www.everydaybrilliance.co.uk/ for more information on the scheme.

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About Network Rail

We own, operate and develop Britain's railway infrastructure; that's 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations. We run 20 of the UK's largest stations while all the others, over 2,500, are run by the country's train operating companies.

Usually, there are almost five million journeys made in the UK and over 600 freight trains run on the network. People depend on Britain's railway for their daily commute, to visit friends and loved ones and to get them home safe every day. Our role is to deliver a safe and reliable railway, so we carefully manage and deliver thousands of projects every year that form part of the multi-billion pound Railway Upgrade Plan, to grow and expand the nation's railway network to respond to the tremendous growth and demand the railway has experienced - a doubling of passenger journeys over the past 20 years.

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