Southampton students to compete at the IMechE Railway Challenge to build the best locomotive

A team of six student volunteers have been working hard to prepare and update an existing locomotive that will work on 10¼” gauge railway line and powerful enough to transport over a 600 kg load in order to compete in the IMechE’s Railway Challenge.

The competition will see teams from universities and industry compete against each other to design and manufacture the best, most innovative, efficient and quietest small-scale locomotive. This is the second year that the University has entered the competiton.

The team leader, Tom Parker, a second-year Mechanical Engineering student who is about to finish his year placement with Siemens, said about the team’s involvement in the competition:

“This is a great opportunity to gain hands-on experience of what’s needed to make a locomotive which complies with the regulations. The competition mimics a real-life tendering process and we are required to prepare a business case and design a range of onboard systems to make the locomotive function.

“The experience will be invaluable in our future careers and we are looking forward to putting our hard work to the test. We’re very grateful to have been supported by Siemens, both financially and logistically.

The competition comprises of a series of track based and presentation challenges, including a design report and the production of an academic paper on the innovations in the locomotive. The track-based challenges include: energy storage, traction, ride comfort, noise, maintainability and energy efficiency.

The competition will take place on 2–3 July 2016 at Stapleford Miniature Railway in Leicestershire. The team have been conducting their testing at the local miniature railway Eastleigh Lakeside Steam Railway. We are grateful for all their help and cooperation. The team's academic supervisor is Dr Mohamed Torbati.