Interview with Marc CIAIS, Class of 2003, Alumni and Head of ESTACA's Guided Transportation program

What are the objectives of the Railway Engineer course?

Our aim is to ensure that when a graduate leaves the school and arrives on a train, on a maintenance workshop construction project, on line regeneration work or in an operations center, he or she understands exactly what is going on around him or her, and is able to apply engineering methods to optimize, solve problems, model solutions and apply them. In addition to their engineering skills, we aim to prepare them as much as possible for the context in which they will be working.

As part of their 4th year of training, we also train students to respond to invitations to tender: for an entire year, they compete in teams to respond to an invitation to tender for a fictitious public rail transport contract. In the final year, we round out the curriculum with more open courses, for example on interpersonal relations, organizational and human factors, to give them some perspective on engineering know-how.

The aim of the training program is therefore not to make specialists in a specific field, but rather multi-skilled engineers in all railway subsystems.

What are the special features of the course?

We train our engineers from the design phase right through to the operational use of systems, covering infrastructure, rail traffic and rolling stock. We cover all the components of the railway system, while studying the interfaces between these sub-systems, which are generally the source of problems, and therefore of the engineer's work.

It's a technical and applied training program: our engineers are appreciated for their ability to be immediately operational in their jobs, and for their pragmatic reasoning. The course is run entirely by working engineers from the railway sector, with strong involvement from the SNCF and ALSTOM groups, as well as HITACHI, EGIS, TRANSDEV and others. Of the 400 hours of tuition dedicated to the sector, almost 100 hours are spent on practical work, either at the school on in-house equipment (light vehicle or simulator), or in the field. For example, thanks to SNCF Voyageurs, we recently went to the Technicentre Est-Européen in Pantin with 4th year students, as part of the train system architecture course module. Being inside a TGV locomotive is ten times faster and more effective in helping students understand how a component works than a classroom lecture, because the student sees it working and visualizes it in its environment.

In addition to practical work, the course includes at least six application projects carried out during the course:

• engineering projects, where students learn how to implement and dimension rail system components, while leaving plenty of room for innovation. For example, students work on a mixed passenger-freight TER, a European night-time sleeper TGV, a self-propelled train dedicated to piggybacking, a cargo tramway for urban freight transport, etc.
• cross-disciplinary technical projects where students learn to challenge their technical skills and position themselves in global projects involving line construction or renovation, or in response to calls for tender.
• industrial projects proposed and supervised by companies: SNCF Voyageurs, COLASRAIL, TSO, TRACTEDIS, SIEMENS, etc.

Students also have the opportunity to develop innovations and test them on a light vehicle built by the students themselves over the last two years. These new concepts are then tested in line, under the same traffic conditions as the cyclo draisines (or velorails).

An important specificity is that at ESTACA we bring together real railway enthusiasts. Many of our students have chosen this school because they have dreamed of trains since they were children. So we also draw on this enthusiasm, and there's a real sense of competition between them to develop their knowledge of the field. They organize site visits, conferences and technical projects among themselves (notably through the Guided Ways association), all of which are highly complementary to what they learn in class.

How is training adapting to future challenges in the rail industry?

There are many needs for innovation and development if we are to continue to develop the industry in the context of the ecological transition. We need to renew infrastructures, modernize networks, develop freight services (as an alternative to road freight), make progress on autonomous trains and develop automation. Innovation is also needed in terms of energies and engines, with the end of diesel trains scheduled for 2050. Finally, let's not forget the international stakes: French rail expertise is exported very well, and today's market is global (40% of the SNCF Group's sales, for example, are now made abroad). Engineers therefore need to be ready to take up all these challenges, ready to innovate to develop new technologies, ready to adapt to a fast-changing world whose challenges we don't fully understand today, and therefore able to work in a multicultural world to work outside our borders.

The training is really designed with the players in the railway world in mind. As an engineer with the SNCF Group, I'm in constant contact with the needs in the field, as are most of the lecturers at ESTACA. We also rely on feedback from former graduates who work in the industry and are the first vectors of information. They tell us which courses are most useful to them, which ones need to be taken further, and which projects will develop and require more skills. In particular, they encourage us to go out into the field more and more, to continue developing the systemic, pragmatic and technical side of training. In addition, on a more institutional level, to project ourselves into the long term, a Strategic Council dedicated to the rail industry regularly brings together leading industry representatives to give their vision of the evolution of the skills they will need.

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