About the Author
My name's Edwin Hopper, I'm an Engineer in my late 20's working in the UK Rail Industry.
I was born in Malawi and came to the UK when I was 18 months old. After a fairly standard school education I did a BTEC in Electronic Engineering, followed by a BEng in Electrical & Electronic Engineering at The University of Bath.
After Graduating in 2000 I worked for just over a year with an Oil Exploration company based in both Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria. My work included spending long periods on seismic camps in the middle of the bush, broken up by periods of work in Canada and France. I worked a 6 week on- 3 week off cycle and during my time off I travelled overland from Bangkok, Thailand, to Singapore via Malaysia. I also visited family in New Orleans, USA.
The events of September the 11th 2001 took place during my last stint in Canada. Being away from home and travelling a lot made those events seem very 'real' (for want of a better term) for me, and then a family crisis back home made me decide to move back to the UK, and left my job in Nigeria.
I expected to find work again quickly, however despite what you have been told about the shortage of degree educated engineer's in Britain it was very hard to get work as a fresh graduate (which was what I really was unless I looked for work in the North Sea). This is largely due to the fact that most companies really only want fully qualified engineers. To become qualified you normally have to work for a time as a trainee or graduate trainee, and most British companies used to have a training scheme. However someone realised that they could save money by doing away with their expensive scheme and poach away graduates who had completed their training with another company. Sadly lots of people realised this, and we are now in a situation where the country is crying out for engineers, but not willing to train them.
So on arrival back in the UK I started working at a factory fixing credit card machines. This wasn't too bad, I'd done plenty of factory work before to pay my way through University, but I never expected to have to go back to that sort of work after graduation.
Luckily I got a place on one of the last engineering graduate training schemes, and in early(ish) 2002 after only a few months fixing credit card machines I moved to London, and a position within one of the newly created London Underground Infraco's in Canary Wharf.
A year later the Infraco was sold to a consortium of companies, and privatised. There has been a lot said about how bad things are following privatisation, however from my perspective things began to get better very quickly.
Under the public sector you used to hear a lot of reasons whay things couldn't be changed, why they had to stay the same, why they couldn't be fixed or just 'we don't do things that was around here'. One of the sayings that I used to hear almost daily (in various forms) as a young engineer went:
I haven't got one of these fancy degree things, and I don't see the need for all this training, I've been here for 40 years, I did my apprentice training and that was enough for me to know that you are wrong.
Anyone who has worked in the railways knows what I mean. Anyway things getting better: After privatisation you stopped hearing those things, and problems really did start to get fixed, and to date more of the tired old assets are being renewed with modern European and American/ Canadian proven systems, rather than equipment that was litterally designed in the 1800's and only manufactured on bespoke order by a handfull or craftsmen.
Due to that during the next, and final year of my training things really did take off for me. I was seconded out to work on European railway infrastructure, trained in the latest forms of signalling and control (under the public sector I had been trained in the London Underground default signalling system, circa 1883/84) and moved up to management far faster than I would have been under the public sector. This wasn't due to the fact that the private sector brought with it all these new people, rather that it freed the people who had been working under the public sector for years, and allowed them to develop staff as they saw fit. I owe a great deal to those people.
Of course many people also lost their jobs, largely those whose only qualification was 'I've been here for X years'. Some of those people who went were of course vital to the business, and for a time it did suffer, but for the most part (and this sounds more callous than I really intend) it was a good thing to loose so much dead weight. In a just Universe I shall of course probably suffer the same fate one day.
Anyhow, my perspective on the privatisation of the railways aside; following the graduate training scheme I became a Project Support Engineer, and very quickly a Lead Engineer thanks to two other managers who significantly helped my career (you may have noticed that I mention no names, this is purely to try and keep personal details from the public eye), and encouraged me during the next 3 years to lead the introduction of the first completely new point machine on any London Underground infrastructure in over 120 years. At the same time I led the introduction of a temperature monitoring system (adopted later by the London Underground Cooling the Tube Project), and played a very small part in enabling the introduction of Transmission Based Train Control (TBTC; driverless trains) on the Underground. By 2006 I was an Acting Project Manager.
Of course my personal life wasn't totally stagnant, I even managed to find a truly wonderful woman, who after 5 years of living with me in sin did me the honour of becoming my wife in 2006. Kelly and I decided soon after our wedding that we'd like to have children, and looked at the logistics. We both had 2 hour commutes to work (4 hours a day on the train) and decided that we'd really like to be at home with future kids far more than we currently could. Due to house prices in the UK we couldn't more any closer to London (unless we got a flat, in which case we couldn't have children), so we looked for work away from the capital. We both got lucky and found work closer to home at the same pay we'd received in London, and so in early 2007 I joined a company working on the mainline UK railways as a Project Engineer.
More good news followed and in December 2006 I also became a Chartered Engineer, something I had been working towards since starting my degree in 1997.
Currently (April 2007) Kelly and I are looking for a bigger house, and as soon as we have moved in we hope to start a family. I have applied for EurIng status (professional engineer within Europe), which I hope to hear about by June 2007.
Pretty much all my personal interests and hobbies are covered in the content of this website.
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