Crossrail is due to transform London's transport system when
services start next autumn, and a critical part of the project
is the trains built by Canada's Bombardier.
But someone needs to keep those trains running,
and Britain faces a critical shortage of the engineers
and technicians required.
So I've come to Bombardier's new depot
at Old Oak Common in west London to find out
how the company is tackling that very tricky challenge.
Oliver Holmes, who's training the staff that
will keep the trains running, explains
why demand for the right skills is so high
and what Bombardier is doing to address the challenge.
There's a lot of investment going in the rail industry.
Everybody is bringing out new fleets of trains,
so demand is high.
We've been very fortunate in the fact we got a lot of people
from the forces.
They've left the forces, and they come and join us,
and they're bringing on some great, transferable skills.
They're highly trained, and those skills slot
right into what we require from them.
Obviously, to a lot of bystanders
these trains would look pretty similar to traditional trains,
but they're fairly different inside.
What kind of different skills do you
need to recruit to maintain a train like this?
In these trains, the technology is very advanced on them now.
So a lot of people we have working on them
are very good at IT.
We have internet networks on the trains,
and they're very good working the software,
and they are good at good sort of analysis,
in interpreting faults and so on.
They've been able to fix them, overcome that.
Bernadette Westmoreland tells me about the multiple initiatives
the company is taking to find new stuff.
They include encouraging members of black and minority ethnic,
or Bame communities, to come into an industry
where they've historically been underrepresented.
It's really important to us as an organisation.
There's lots of statistics that show diverse organisations
perform better, and we are approaching that through
a number of different routes.
We're engaging with a number of social partners
to provide work placement opportunities, CV mentoring, et
cetera, to give people an experience of rail
and the different careers within rail.
We're using our graduate and apprenticeship programmes
to increase the diverse talent pools that we are pulling from.
So we're delighted that we have over 20
per cent Bame in our graduate and apprentice pools,
and around 20 per cent female as well
in our graduate pool, which has been a real step change for us.
Brad Grey, previously an engineer
in heavy trucks and now training is a maintenance assistant,
illustrates how Bombardier is trying
to find people with the right transferable skills to retrain.
That's quite a culture shock, yeah,
to actually find out how much you can read off of a train
just by a laptop, if you know what I mean?
And faults-wise.
Are you pleased you made the switch?
Yeah, 100 per cent .
Yeah
What's better about it?
Well, this is a really exciting project, to start with.
Obviously, living in the area myself, the whole
project itself, when it's running,
will make a difference to my life,
to my girlfriend's life, people who we know.
So that side of things is exciting for me, the fact
that when this is successful, it will change
the whole of the area, really.
It's clear that the UK generally, and the rail
industry in particular, still face a big skills gap.
Companies like Bombardier are reacting
by training some people, retraining others,
and reaching out to new groups.
Nobody is pretending the problem has been solved,
but the steps that are being taken
are doing a great deal to ensure that these trains should
be ready next year to whisk millions of passengers
across central London.