Norman Train reflects on some of the events in his life en route to the top position at the Institution.
Early life
I was conceived on a smoggy night in early 1952 when there was nothing on the steam radio…. We lived in a top floor flat, off the Cromwell Road, in Kensington, overlooking the Circle and District Lines interchange between Earls Court and Gloucester
Road and my earliest memory of construction was the infill of this triangle to form the West London Air Terminal (now a Sainsburys store). My fate was probably sealed when we found the crane driver’s name was Norman; there is no more impressionable person to a 4-year old than a crane driver!
I was educated at the City of London School at Blackfriars and I have always had an affinity with the City which I still maintain as a liveryman with the Worshipful Company of Engineers.
My A levels were Maths, Physics and Chemistry, so my degree was always going to be a science or applied science. With both my father and elder brother being chemical engineers, the only thing I knew was that I wasn’t going to be tail-end-Charlie to them and did not want to study chemical engineering.
I was attracted by the human scale and social worth of civil engineering rather than other types of engineering. ‘The pick and shovel brigade’ as Sir Alan Harris once described us. Architectural Engineering sounded interesting as a course, and so it was off to Leeds University in 1971.
Before that I had I spent part of a gap year as a chainman with J Laing in 1970 and also worked as a soils laboratory technician and a junior draftsman – a useful preparation for university.
Consequently I was the most conceited know-it-all when I started at Leeds. I also tried my hand at reinforcement fixing since as a junior draftsman I had mastered the rudiments of detailing.
Unfortunately I only lasted a day, not because I could not understand what was required, but because I did not have the strength in my wrists to keep tying the wire for 9 hours.
Career highlights and lows
I graduated in 1974, gaining experience with Mitchell McFarlane and Partners for 5 months in Hong Kong, then working in the materials laboratory and Road Construction Unit of West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council. I joined W G Curtins in 1978. 4 years later I opened Baynham Meikle’s London office, and have been unemployable ever since! I became a Partner in 1986 and in 1992 formed Train & Kemp.
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CV highlights
Academic Qualifications
1974 BSc Architectural Engineering – University of Leeds
Professional Qualifications
1979 Member Institution of Structural Engineers; 1989 Fellow
1979 Member Member Institution of Civil Engineers; 1992 Fellow
1995 Fellow, Chartered Institute of Arbitrators
Career History:
1975-1978 Graduate, West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council
1978-1982 Design Engineer, W G Curtins
1982-1992 Associate, then Partner, Baynham Meikle Partnership
1992 Partner in Train and Kemp, then Director of Train and Kemp Ltd and Principal, Train and Kemp (Consulting Engineers) LLP
Prizes
1974 R H Evans Departmental Prize for services to University of Leeds
1976 ICE Yorkshire: Graduates and Students Competition
1995 CIArb: Part 3 Examination Prize
2004 IStructE: Sir Arnold Waters Medal |
My principal structural interests are in foundations and refurbishment and I have lectured on ground movement, cracking and defects in buildings. I used my geotechnical experience in investigating a number of foundation failures. Refurbishment and repair projects have included heritage buildings such as Somerset House, Waterhouse’s National Liberal Club, Whitehall, St Thomas’s Church, St Thomas’s St, London Bridge (which settled 90mm with the construction of the Jubilee Line); and Lutyen’s Reuters Building on Fleet Street.
My other main interests, in health and safety and the environment, stem from 1975 when I was an assistant to the Flixborough Disaster Court of Inquiry and helped in the initial contamination investigations in Docklands. Since then I have completed a number of contamination remediation schemes and I was awarded the Institution’s Sir Arnold Waters Medal for my paper on contaminated land in 2004.
The most challenging and interesting project with which I have been involved was the Kings Cross Western Ticket Hall in the early part of this decade, where we were the contractor’s engineer developing the temporary works and value engineering the proposed scheme. The Western Ticket Hall is constructed beneath St Pancras forecourt, over the running tunnels to the Circle and Metropolitan Lines and underneath Euston Road, all whilst keeping the Grade 1 listed front wall of the forecourt in position. The solution required cutting the top off the brick tunnel to the eastern tunnel and building a temporary raised deck for Euston Road whilst the works were completed beneath this.
The low points were the fragmentation of the Baynham Meikle Partnership, where I had worked for a decade prior to Martin Kemp and I forming Train and Kemp in 1992 and, more recently some of the redundancies forced by the recession in the last 18
months. Martin Kemp’s tragic death in 2003 stunned and shocked me, but in needing to keep the practice going, I could not afford to let it become a low point; it was a case of battling through with the help of the other directors and staff acting as our own support team.
Train and Kemp rose, phoenix like, from the ashes of the 1991-92 recession. At the time we shared our offices with a wily old Scottish engineer who had been through his own consultancy splits and break ups and Bob told me, ‘In 2 years time you will look back at this and see that it was the best thing that happened to you’. I could not see it at the time, but Bob was right.
Start up is an exhilarating and creative time; but equally it can be precarious and lonely. We need to support those who have embarked on such ventures as I will make clear in my President’s address.
A major change that I have seen in my career has been the erosion of fee levels since the abolition of scale fees. Structural engineers have lost status with a tendency of some to see our service as primarily a number crunching exercise, rather than adding value through all the facets of design and delivery.
Another major change has been in the use of computers which have revolutionised engineering since I started on a drawing board with ink pens. The pocket calculator can be taken as a symbol of my career in that as a piece of social history, when I graduated in 1974 it was the last year when pocket calculators were banned in Leeds Civil Engineering Department, based on the argument that it was only the rich Persian students that could afford them. By 1975 the price of the calculator had dropped and the slide rule and log tables of my finals were relics of the past. Electronic manufacturing costs have plummeted during my career and scientific calculators are now available in the local pound shop. Incalculable wealth down to £1.00 in 3½ decades!
Outside interests
I met my wife, Wanda, whilst at Leeds. We met at a fancy dress party when she was a beautiful Spanish seniorita and I was part of a crossword puzzle. We have four daughters and two grandsons with a third due in February. My eldest daughter (with
the two grandsons) has gone back to work part time and my second daughter, expecting her first child, is a full-time mum. My other two daughters work as an administrator in a travel company and as a physiotherapist.
With everyone living longer, there were already granddads and grandfathers in the family when my first grandson was born and so my daughters came up with the sobriquet of ‘Grumps’ on the basis that I always looked grumpy. So it will always be ‘Grandma and Grumps’.
The extended Train family is almost as global as the Institution in that we have representatives in all five main continents. Wanda’s family came from Poland, my brother is in Thailand and Wanda’s sister is in the Middle East; my nephew is American, one of my daughters is married to a Moroccan and we have cousins in Australia.
I enjoy DIY and built our kitchen extension. The last two recessions have been marked by my attempts to build a folly in the garden as a manual break at the weekend from the commercial pressures of the week. The early 1990s project was a York stone BBQ with shingle roof, which has since been demolished. This year it was a hipped timber roof over our garden table and chairs.
I jog on a Sunday morning with a few friends and undo all the benefits of the exercise with tea and copious toast afterwards. For over 20 years I have taken circuit training classes at the Central YMCA in London with my last class being in January before taking over as President.
Challenges to the profession I see the main challenges for the profession and Institution over the next year as Eurocodes, mandatory reporting on CPD and climate change/sustainability. I will say more about these in my Presidential Address.
For me, issues about heritage and sustainability came together in a project at East Midlands Airport Hotel where my firm, Train and Kemp was responsible for the extension to the hotel. East Midlands Airport was originally a bomber command airfield during the Second World War and as a defence against enemy action the bombers were parked in a dispersed arrangement around the perimeter of the airfield. We obtained a copy of the dispersed pods as part of our research into the history of the site, and finding that one of the pods was approximately where we intended to site part of the extended car park, we probed and found the pod as a layer of 0.5m thick concrete which formed a more than adequate car park base. It is for this reason that amongst the rectilinear parking of the hotel, the circular bays of the old bomber pod stand out as an example of reuse of heritage for a modern usage.
I believe the public image of structural engineers is of crucial importance and will be looking at the opportunities for raising this during my year as President.
I had direct experience of one way in which to gain publicity for the profession when in April 2004 I responded to an invitation from The Times newspaper to travel to the Athens Olympics site with its reporters and photographer to give them an expert’s idea of whether the facilities would be ready on time, given that there were only 4 months to go. I inadvertently got front page coverage in The Times which featured security at the Games, with more inside on the structures, followed by radio interviews and a five page article in The Structural Engineer (4 May 2004). I said at the time, and reiterate now: if you ever get asked by a journalist to act as a construction/engineering specialist, grab the opportunity with both hands!
In attracting young people to the profession, we need to celebrate the creativity and teamwork of civil and structural engineering as well as social benefits. We also need to promote the international opportunities of membership of the Institution.
Young people are keenly aware of the environment and climate change and there are opportunities for structural engineers to lead on aspects of climate change.
There has been a massive turn around in the employment market from the excesses of the employment agencies in 2007 to the current position. As an industry we need to learn about and find ways to change the culture of recruitment and employment in this electronic age.
Raising a smile
My pictorial signature started as doodles on the back of school exercise books, becoming my ‘second signature’ by the time I went to university.
It was the informality of fax in the early 1980s when I started to use the pictorial Train signature in business and found that it raised a smile, and equally that I was remembered. Consequently I used it more, changing all my credit cards as they came up for renewal, and by the early 1990s I was using it on all documents including passport, driving licence and all the commercial documents relating to the practice.
My pictorial Train has been my formal signature for nigh on 20 years and I hope it will raise a smile during my presidency.
Norman Train gave his Presidential Address on 15 January at Institution HQ. The text was aldo published in full in the 19 January issue of The Structural Engineer.