The Railway Division’s 57th chair is Rebeka Sellick who, at 57 years old, was born in the year the world’s first automatic passenger railway (the London Underground Victoria line) started operation. Rebeka started her round-Britain tour with Chair’s Addresses in Swindon on 8 September and at IMechE headquarters in London two days later.
Recognising that even Railway Division chairs are just cogs in a complex system, Rebeka used the word ‘connections’ from the title of her address in the widest sense, to inspire engineers current and future to make connections and influence decision makers, particularly those who sadly (she said) are not engineers. Rebeka said she is curious person, showing a photo of her peering out of a train during the Railway Division Technical Tour, as well as fallible, as she couldn’t remember why she was peering out of the train.
Career
Rebeka started her career as a British Rail (BR) sponsored student at Derby Works in 1986 and, following University ‘holidays’ in BR facilities in Inverness, London, and Derby, had the opportunity to work in Paris on TGV maintenance. Her first substantive job was as depot shift production manager at Wembley, followed by area services manager. In 1994 with privatisation, Rebeka became a maintenance engineer with Porterbrook, gaining her CEng in the same year.
In 1995, she joined Interfleet Technology (now AtkinsRéalis) to create and lead its asset management and maintenance services team. In 2002, she became engineering director for the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), now Rail Delivery Group (RDG), and a fellow of the IMechE, before rejoining Interfleet in 2009 focussing on research and development. In 2016 she formed her own company SellickRail and, in 2021, joined Cordel.ai as business development director.
Even before embarking on an engineering career, Rebeka was conscious that there might be prejudice. She first encountered this on the run up to her O levels (GCSEs today) when she was pulled out of assembly by Mrs Barker, her form teacher who said: “don’t you know that there are rough men in engineering?” This led Rebeka to ask all the engineers in the room to stand and take a look at each other and assess the degree to which they were rough men! She ignored Mrs Barker but still had some work to do. In an early job someone told her that he’d never met a lady production manager and was gently told that he’d just met a production manager who happened to be female.
Connections
Moving on to the benefits of rail and its connections, Rebeka described an IMechE report she co-authored in 2017 – Increasing Capacity: putting Britain’s railways back on track. This outlined four case studies, only one of which – the London Underground Victoria line Upgrade – has so far been delivered. It showed that maximising passenger capacity is achieved by:
- Accelerating quickly: easiest if electric (power:weight ratio).
- Braking quickly: difficult for long freight trains.
- All trains on a line having the same performance: hardest on a mixed traffic railway (hence HS2’s segregation, now sadly truncated somewhat).
- For passenger trains, having enough doors to enable short station dwells: e.g., plentiful doors and fast door cycles, level boarding and alighting, interiors designed for passenger flow.
While these are all characteristics of metro railways, they were also key principles of HS2 which some had described as a ‘very fast metro’. Rebeka compared and contrasted the approach of Deutsche Bahn and HS2 where the former had compared the land take of a new Inter-City high speed line with that required for a six-lane motorway, whereas HS2’s popular perception is fairly modest reductions in journey time, ignoring the capacity benefits (which sadly have been reduced by political changes).
Rebeka explained how the IMechE makes engineering connections beyond railways with ‘The Transport Hierarchy: A Cross-Modal Strategy to Deliver a Sustainable Transport System’. This prioritises reducing unnecessary travel, then switching travel to the most efficient mode and further improving each mode’s efficiency; making more connections between teams, companies, and disciplines.
Further connections are shown in the Rail Technical Strategy, last updated in 2024. Its original 2007 objectives, the 4Cs – better for the CUSTOMER, lower CARBON, higher CAPACITY, and lower overall COST – are still relevant today. It emphasises five priorities:
- Easy to use for all.
- Freight friendly.
- Low emissions.
- Optimised train operations.
- Efficient and reliable assets.
All these objectives and priorities are inter-connected of course. Rebeka used ‘Freight Friendly’ as an example. The government has set a rail freight growth target of 75% by 2050. But what has to be done to enable this, profitably, as all the UK freight operators work in a fiercely competitive environment? Rebeka described ‘shiny new hybrid freight locomotives’ (aka Classes 93 and 99) which can reduce the run time of freight trains significantly and deliver better asset utilisation. However, this is only part of the equation. Although the new freight locomotive directly helps the ‘low emissions’ priority, people leading all the other priorities have a role to play in enabling the faster run times the new loco offers.
For passenger operations, connections are all important, especially for decarbonising. Some of these connections include: connecting the railway to the electricity grid; connecting the grid to green power sources; connecting trains to power supplies; connections for passengers between, say, main line and branch line trains; and connections between trains (e.g., compatibility between couplers or virtual coupling).
Rail can deliver zero emissions at point of use, but this depends critically on the green credentials of the supply: zero carbon electricity or, perhaps, hydrogen. Transport represents 28% of UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, with nearly 90% of that proportion coming from road transport and just 1.5% from rail. To illustrate the challenge, Rebeka took a number of straw polls from her audiences to see who lived in car-free homes and who aspired to do so.
Looking ahead
In the year of Rail 200, Rebeka looked to where the railway might go in the next 200 years. She believes that the 4Cs are still relevant and looked at a number of supporting factors and connections:
- Speed – or appropriate journey times for the UK’s comparatively small size? Speed is connected to energy carbon and cost. In 2025, train cabs operate at speeds that are about 12 times faster than in 1825, so how fast should trains go in 2225?
- Cost – 100-200 year view: connect across transport modes, beyond rail.
- Seamless – end-to-end journeys: connect technology to unlocking future potential.
- Culture – imagination: connect people with what could be possible and provide the tools to exploit the possible.
- Politics: encourage cross party connections for an apolitical transport policy.
Climate concerns
Back to the IMechE’s Transport Hierarchy and challenges to improve the environmental efficiency of the rail mode.
There’s a huge amount of embedded carbon in today’s railways. Fixed infrastructure is usually designed for a life of 125 years. Trains last nominally 40 years. No one knows how long assets will last in practice, though, and it can make sense to keep assets in service longer if condition is good and/or money is short.
Rebeka advocated deliberate asset management for whole-life carbon benefit and cited the 1980s SNCF TGV vehicles she’d worked on in Paris in 1991, now receivingRe a back-to-metal “half-life” refurbishment as seen on the 2025 IMechE Rail Technical Tour. She contrasted this with the notion, which was popular at the start of rail privatisation, of the new train that would be thrown away at the end of a seven-year franchise.
Rebeka alluded to the question of whether asset monitoring and maintenance could be more efficient, which is her day job and the subject of a 6 November IMechE seminar. She also mentioned Arup’s 2019 look at railways in 2050 and noted its comment that automated passenger trains optimise running time and reliability – as London Underground discovered 57 years ago on the Victoria line.
In July 2025, the 20,000 UK manufacturers represented by Make UK issued a report supporting the government target to increase rail freight by 75%. When discussing infrastructure upgrades it reported that:
- Eighty-five percent of manufacturers support resurrecting HS2 to Leeds & Manchester.
- Eighty-nine percent also back high-speed rail links between major Northern cities.
- Sixty-two percent say increased rail investment would improve access to labour.
- Thirty-eight percent cite poor access to local terminals as a barrier to rail freight use.
- Sixty-two percent want the Government to prioritise multimodal systems to boost rail transport.
As Rebeka put it: “They want to use rail freight. They’re with this ‘75% by 2050’. They want to have lower reliance on roads. They want to cut our emissions. What’s preventing them? What’s stopping them is they haven’t got access to local terminals. They want some priorities on multimodal systems so that they can use road and rail in a mixture where it’s appropriate to do so.”
It’s probably fair to say that passengers would also want seamless access to rail and/or road as appropriate, but the biggest passenger complaints currently are about reliability (20%) and overcrowding (13%). The challenge is delivering improved reliability and more space while creating more paths for freight. How could trains be made longer? Are platform lengths a constraint? Rebeka outlined a proposal for trains splitting and joining in motion – building on slip coaches of the past? This could be something that might become possible once ETCS level 3 is in use.
The Make UK report found that 45% of manufacturers said that cost is the biggest impediment to increased reliance on rail with cost-per-tonne increasing by 10% in the last decade compared with 3% for road. Forty-two percent of manufacturers said there is insufficient capacity. Although rail is green – even when diesel powered – manufacturers say that carbon reduction doesn’t matter enough…yet. This led Rebeka to speculate on whether carbon extravagance could be made to seem as antisocial as smoking in public has become in the last few decades.
Looking outward
Summing up Rebeka wondered whether a fifth or sixth C was required: for Complementary (rather than Competition) approach to transport; and Connect i.e., connecting policies (e.g., industrial, railway, skills) for transport overall.
Could the story of the last 200 years inform the future which includes the formation of Great British Railways and lead to a very long term 100-200 year plan? We could all work towards this, as individuals, as engineers, and with The IMechE and other engineering and professional institutions and people. Rebeka’s focus as chair will be to lead an outward-looking IMechE Railway Division to draw in new railway engineers and keep the rest of us inspired.
She said that she has been: “Inspired, particularly by young members’ professionalism, persistence, and passion leading to a virtuous circle; inspiring more engineers who make more good connections to inspire and influence – inside and around the railway.”
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