24.02.14
UK Rail Industry Training Trust fundraising tops £90,000
The UK Rail Industry Awards have raised over £90,000 for the UK Rail Industry Training Trust (UKRITT) so far.
The inaugural Awards on Thursday night at The Brewery in London were a fundraising extravaganza for the new charity, with 20% of all revenue raised going to UKRITT, plus a £5,000 personal donation from Trustee Roy Rowlands and all the money raised at a charity casino sponsored by Konecranes held at the end of the night, which totalled £580. That brings the total raised so far to £90,376.35.
The star prize – a luxury weekend supercar experience in Scotland donated by Lang Atholl –went to Lewi Griffiths, commercial director at Pera Training, who cashed in the most chips at the charity casino.
The runners-up included Alex Flinton of East Coast Trains who won high-end Ferrari merchandise donated by Shell; Neil O’Connor who won the Samsung Galaxy Tab; and a section engineer with Costain who won the Tom Tom sat nav.
The Awards were also used to announce Fiona Tordoff, chief executive of the IRO, as a Trustee of the UK Rail Industry Training Trust. Other senior figures in the industry keen to get involved with UKRITT and the Gen Y Rail events can contact Roy Rowlands for more details on 0161 833 6320.
The first Gen Y Rail event was held in Newcastle earlier this month, and has been widely praised as a huge success. The full write-up will be in the upcoming Feb/March 2014 edition of RTM, but you can read more about the event here: www.railtechnologymagazine.com/Rail-News/gen-y-rail-kicks-off-in-the-north-east
As Network Rail chairman Richard Parry-Jones put it in his keynote speech at the Awards: “By 2040 our railway will look very different, physically and technically. The services we offer to the travelling public will also be transformed. To make all that happen, we need a constant flow of skilled, highly-motivated people coming into our industry here in the UK. This promise of the future helps us to attract new blood into the industry, which will be so essential to our future success.
“In other words, if the investment we expect over that timeframe is all to be delivered, we absolutely need to expand the skills base, and to encourage more young people to join the excitement of this industry. I'm pleased to say that the evidence is here this evening that the industry really recognises this and is investing in solving that problem.”
To see the winners at the Awards, decided upon by a pan-industry group of leading rail industry judges using objective scoring criteria, click here.
(Image shows students at UKRITT’s first Gen Y Rail event being interviewed on camera by RTM’s Kate Ashley)
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