Railway consultant information

[FlyingPotato]

Hi, I'm interested in learning about the role of a railway consultant, is there any places I can go to gain more information or does anyone have any themselves.
The information I'd like is firms that offer roles, responsibilities, possible benefits and the day to day life of a railway consultant.

To add, this is just research on potential long term career plans nothing else, (Just an undergrad rn)

 

[edwin_m]

Hi, I'm interested in learning about the role of a railway consultant, is there any places I can go to gain more information or does anyone have any themselves.
The information I'd like is firms that offer roles, responsibilities, possible benefits and the day to day life of a railway consultant.

To add, this is just research on potential long term career plans nothing else, (Just an undergrad rn)

What's your degree? There are numerous different disciplines that may fall under the title of consultant and may work on rail projects, including all flavours of engineering, planning/economics, and environmental.

Depending on role and what work is available at the time, you could be working on anything from a feasibility study into a railway in a country with no railways, through to detail design on a rail or tram project.

 

[Horizon22]

All your major infrastructure consultants (AECOM, Atkins, Jacobs, WSP etc.) do some rail consultancy to some degree.

As @edwin_m said this is hugely dependent on discipline as there's engineers, managers, technial experts, enviornmentalists, planners all involved in "consultancy" for rail.

You could probably join one of the above firms as an undergraduate if you wanted and research the specific departments within that.

 

[FlyingPotato]

What's your degree? There are numerous different disciplines that may fall under the title of consultant and may work on rail projects, including all flavours of engineering, planning/economics, and environmental.

Depending on role and what work is available at the time, you could be working on anything from a feasibility study into a railway in a country with no railways, through to detail design on a rail or tram project.

My degree is business management (with international study if it helps)
I'm getting skills in people management, economics, accounting, analytics, entrepreneurship, business start up and so on

My dream is to do railway consulting for big rail and infrastructure projects

 

[edwin_m]

My degree is business management (with international study if it helps)
I'm getting skills in people management, economics, accounting, analytics, entrepreneurship, business start up and so on

My dream is to do railway consulting for big rail and infrastructure projects

The economics/planning roles are to do with demand forecasting, business cases and various types of modelling such as simulation of rail networks. It requires a good level of numeracy and a graduate would probably start off in a technical role with an opportunity to move into project management, line management or marketing after a few years. There will be opportunties to work across a range of transport modes and beyond, but a good employer will take account of someone's interests and ambitions - knowledge of railways is good to have provided it can be turned to some useful purpose!

I work for one of the big consultancies, but there are also many smaller firms, where there's probably less choice of project to work on but perhaps also less risk of being pigeonholed into a specific role within a large team - I imagine people have to turn their hand more to whatever needs doing.

 

[FlyingPotato]

The economics/planning roles are to do with demand forecasting, business cases and various types of modelling such as simulation of rail networks. It requires a good level of numeracy and a graduate would probably start off in a technical role with an opportunity to move into project management, line management or marketing after a few years. There will be opportunties to work across a range of transport modes and beyond, but a good employer will take account of someone's interests and ambitions - knowledge of railways is good to have provided it can be turned to some useful purpose!

I work for one of the big consultancies, but there are also many smaller firms, where there's probably less choice of project to work on but perhaps also less risk of being pigeonholed into a specific role within a large team - I imagine people have to turn their hand more to whatever needs doing.

What sort of numerical skills, since I'm not the greatest at maths but I'm gaining decent Excel skills and things like that

 

[edwin_m]

What sort of numerical skills, since I'm not the greatest at maths but I'm gaining decent Excel skills and things like that

Excel is a good starting point, as many of the models are basically very large spreadsheets. It's not my specialism but I think people would need to be comfortable with the maths, for example able to see if something doesn't look right which might happen if someone had missed a zero off one of the numbers and thrown everything out by a factor of ten.