London student wins national prize for designing engineering app

Fahad Rage

An engineering student from London has won a national award for designing an app to help railway engineers.

Fahad Rage claimed the top prize at the Future Industry Leaders Awards, held at the Institution of Engineering and Technology last week.

Fahad has been working with engineering firm Furrer+Frey, as part of a work placement programme run by education charity the Engineering Development Trust (EDT).

For a competition run by EDT, he was asked to design a tool to improving the compatibility of railway electrification projects to Network Rail’s High Output Plant System (HOPS). HOPS is a mechanical “factory on rails”, which has so far been used to speed up the installation of overhead line cables and pylons on the Great Western Railway.

Fahad learned the necessary programming languages to design and build an app, which tells designers instantly if a planned installation is compatible with HOPS.

He said: “My year in industry has given me an insight into the world of work and the importance of communicating effectively with clients and colleagues and of developing my organisational skills. These have certainly contributed to me being able to win the award.”

Fahad’s app has won many plaudits in the rail engineering industry, being described as a “huge boon” to those working to convert lines to HOPS. The youngster is still working on his masters degree in mechanical engineering at University College London. Fahad has shown us how important apps that streamline complicated technological or engineering challenges like ClearCalcs are. They are certainly on the rise, drastically improving otherwise time-consuming or complicated tasks, yet further improvements are needed to meet the growing demands of an ever-expanding industry.

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Chris Ward, EDT’s national director, said: “Fahad has demonstrated that he is an exceptional engineer and his innovation and drive are typical of the students that come to us looking for high quality placements. We are always looking to work with new companies to run placements to identify the future industry leaders that UK engineering industry needs.”

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