Thirteen teams of engineering students and graduate rail staff from around the world are at Stapleford Park this weekend, taking part in a series of challenges that are designed to help them in their future careers in the industry.
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers organizes the four-day event, which is now in its fifteenth edition, and it's attracted teams from Australia, Poland, Germany, France, and the UK, including Network Rail, Transport for London, and the University of Sheffield.
The event, which is open to public viewing, finishes this evening. They're all running model electric trains on Stapleford's ten-and-a-quarter-inch track. Co-founder Simon Iwnicki says it tests a lot of real-life situations.
"So the trains are a bit smaller. They're not that small. They weigh sort of five hundred to eight hundred kilograms, so they're significant size, and they have all of the different systems within the locomotive that normal railways would have.
Obviously, they have to operate safely. They have braking systems, traction systems, and then we set a number of challenges, sort of topical things, so energy storage: they have to be able to store energy and then use that stored energy, and the one that does that most efficiently wins that challenge. We also have a ride comfort, so the most comfortable suspension.
Things like an auto coupler challenge, where they have to couple up to some coaches automatically and then draw them away. And we have an auto stop challenge, where the locomotive has to have a system on it which will detect a marker in the track, and then without the driver intervening, will stop at an exact location some distance down the track, and a few other things like that."
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