Steve Cowser

Said the following about Matt Bower:

“Matt is a rising young rail engineer star within the Network Certification Body (NCB), recently becoming recognised as an industry expert in his field – Electrification.

This year, Matt was invited to represent UK Notification Bodies on the RSSB Energy Standards Committee – working with senior rail industry technical experts to define UK rail standards for electrification – a fast growing feature of the UK rail network.

Matt joined the NCB in December 2012 having worked in a number of engineering roles, providing him with a broad railway knowledge covering infrastructure (track and stations) and energy (electrification and plant) including direct experience in design, management, construction, maintenance and 10 years’ experience as an rail electrification engineer. However, he had very little experience of working with major electrification projects being built to new European standards, namely the Energy Technical Specification for Interoperability (TSI).

So, Matt focussed on learning and developing himself as an engineer in this field, including spending personal time to complete a Further Learning Plan with the objective of achieving professional membership of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers within the next 6 months. Part of this plan contains writing a learned paper requiring 300 to 400 hours effort on the technical principles related to the ‘Interaction of Pantographs and Overhead Contact Lines’. The intention of the report is to deepen his technical knowledge to Masters Level.

He is an effectively self-taught engineer who has become a recognised industry lead for Energy TSI conformance assessment.

He has demonstrated that with a combination of talent, hard work and determination almost anything is possible. And while Matt is very focussed on his personal development, he is also very approachable and friendly, with lots to share about his life, making him a great team player and an inspiration to other developing rail engineers.

In addition to becoming a member of the RSSB Energy Standards Committee, Matt has also achieved the following exceptional rail engineer successes in the last year;

• Developed an industry approach for assessing electrification infrastructure compliance without the need for extensive testing; making substantial savings on time and cost when introducing electric trains to newly electrified railways. Matt was invited to present this approach to UK and European technical experts, including the ORR and DfT.

• Matt is also invited to represents NCB at international forums for NB Rail, NB Rail is a ‘Coordination Group of Notified Bodies for Directive 2008/57/EC on Railway Interoperability’. So Matt, in effect represents the UK in his specialist field.

• Matt was Senior Conformance Engineer on the first Interoperable Electrification Project in the UK (North West Electrification - Phase 1). The scheme was challenging, but Matt rose to this challenge and went above and beyond his duties to ensure that the scheme received authorisation from the ORR.

• Matt is now the Principal Conformance Engineer for the North West Electrification programme, recently certifying conformance to UK and European standards for Phase 2 and now working on Phase 4.“