Engineer
ScotRail

Ronnie G

00:00:02 My name’s Ronnie G. I work for ScotRail and I do continuous team development. Day to day we look at how the guys do their job, try and find out if there’s any problem units, if there’s a particular type of trainer with a specific problem so we then go back and look through the records, see what’s happened, try and trace that back to the teams, or see if there’s a way we can improve the way they do their job. So it’s those kind of things we do.

00:00:26 As a 15 year old kid leaving school I was sort of probably quite shy, I don’t know, I wasn’t as interested in things I should’ve been. I was very closed mind. I was quite happy doing what I was doing and nothing else really bothered me or worried me too much. I just didn’t push myself, you know. It’s easy to think, “Yeah, yeah, I can do this, I can do that,” but if you don’t try it how do you really know? Well, it’s my background, I’ve been doing, I’ve been in engineering since the age of 15 when I left school.

00:00:59 I worked in heavy industry, I went to Ravenscraig. British Steel, worked there from 1985-1991 when it closed so I left there and took a sort of radical jump into the electronics industry at the time. It was JVC where they made televisions. I was there for a year, they had a few problems. It was a bit of a rough time so I then left and went even more radical into semi conductors so I spent 10 years at NEC and while I was doing that I was doing a sort of electrical, fault finding, distribution and things like that.

00:01:30 I was getting a bit bored with that so I thought I would maybe try and jump into law. I started my law degree at roughly 30 years of age. Basically to see, I wanted to push myself. It was quite hard work, I have to say, it was a real culture shock. The first year the amount of studying and work I had to put in so I was just trying to get used to the volume of reading and studying and things I had to do. Being a mature student it was a real, I found it wonderful. Opened my eyes to the world round about me. Tried working with law firms for a while, wasn’t quite for me. Ended up back in engineering beside my father at Ethicon in Edinburgh.

00:02:03 That closed. I drifted into the railway. Said to my father, see, he’s now in the railway as well. I’ve actually quite enjoyed coming to the railway, it’s been a career so far, you know, so I’m looking forward to, don’t know what the future’s going to be but it’s a very interesting and diverse career on the railway. Well, the sort of major decision was probably when NEC started to close. I was between jobs. I was trying to sort of move into the sort of legal side of things.

00:02:32 It really didn’t work out, I ended up with a horrendous job and no real expertise, and no-one to really be at my back and say, “No, you’re doing this or you’re doing that.” So there really wasn’t much support. I found myself very much on my own and I think at that point I thought, I suppose I grew up, really, then, you know. At probably 34, 35 years of age. I’m somewhat of a pessimist as well. I’m quite negative a lot of times. That’s still one of the aspects of my character that hold me back.

00:03:05 I can be very reserved. But, no, I am becoming a bit more optimistic. Now I’m at the stage where I want to try different things, I’m not scared to try different things, I’m not scared to speak to people. I’m trying to be more positive and encourage other people to go a step further which for people that had known me 10 years ago would have said, “No, this guy can never do that. He’s too negative, he won’t do it.”

00:03:32 But now I’m actually trying to encourage other people to do a little bit more and look at things a bit differently. ENDS