Dave Newell wins Rail Safety Person of the Year

Dave Newell

Dave Newell has won this year’s Rail Safety Person of the Year. The prize was presented by Pete Waterman and Pino De Rosa, managing director of Bridgeway Consulting Ltd, sponsors of the Rail Safety Person of the Year.

Says Tom O’Connor, Rail Media Group, which organises the awards, ‘This is a highly deserved award for a person who saves lives and whose influence has directly made the railways a safer place. We should all thank people like Dave Newell.’

Dave Newell, a train driver, is a Child Rail Safety Adviser for Chiltern Railways based at London Marylebone. One of the people who nominated Dave witnessed his safety talks at first hand and went on to join the railway industry. ‘I was there in a school assembly learning about rail safety from the people I would later work with. The lesson they gave me definitely stopped me ever wanting to trespass or throw stones at trains and I remember it being really exciting to have real train drivers come into the school, it made the lesson even more hard-hitting.’

Chiltern Railways runs passenger services between London Marylebone and Birmingham Snow Hill and London Marylebone to Aylesbury via Amersham along the London Underground Metropolitan line. In 2002 it extended operations as far as Kidderminster and in 2004 to Stratford-upon-Avon. Chiltern Railways is owned by Deutsche Bahn AG.

Bridgeway Consulting, which sponsored the Rail Safety Person of the Year is a Principal Contractor licence holder with Network Rail, thus allowing them to manage a multitude of projects from inception to completion. Bridgeway Consulting carries out a vast array of engineering roles across the rail network and abroad, which includes diving & roped access structural inspections through to permanent way works, track & structure alignment surveys, site and ground investigations through to detailed multi-disciplinary civil engineering projects. Other services provided to clients include track access and possession management, on-track security, training & assessments and assurance & compliance services.

The RailStaff Awards, now in its fourth year, celebrates the courage and heroism of the thousands of working people who make up Britain’s fast expanding rail industry. The RailStaff Awards is organised by the Rail Media Group, publishers of RailStaff, the leading industry newspaper specialising in good news stories about the railways and the people who work on them. RMG also publishes the rail engineer magazine taking an in-depth look at railway engineering developments.WWW.railwaypeople.com is a specialist rail recruitment web site also run by RMG. The next RailStaff Awards will be on 8th October 2011 at the International Convention Centre, Birmingham.

Over 500 railway staff and their families attended the RailStaff Awards at the International Convention Centre, Birmingham. Pete Waterman hosted the evening which opened with brief speeches of welcome by Edward Welsh, director of corporate affairs at the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), and Iain Coucher, chief executive of Network Rail. ATOC and Network Rail are Associate Sponsors of the RailStaff Awards. After dinner comedian Alun Cochrane delighted the proceedings. Then, after the actual awards, railway staff danced the night away to live band, Fully FunKtional. ‘It was a great night out, a family get together and a celebration as well as a brilliant party,’ says Gemma King, organiser of the evening and the main manager of the RailStaff Awards.

Big hearted party goers at the RailStaff Awards managed to raise over £2,000 for the Railway Children – official charity of the RailStaff Awards.