Ailie MacAdam
Senior Vice President and Global Rail Sector Lead, Becht el
Senior Vice President and Global Rail Sector Lead, Bechtel
A ilie is one of the UK’s most high-profile female engineers, which was recognised in September when she won RAIL’s prestigious National Rail Award for Outstanding Personal Contribution (Senior Management).
The judges made the award based on her remarkable 30-year rise from joining Bechtel as a graduate chemical engineer in 1985, through to leading the international engineering, construction and project management company’s entire global rail sector (with a staff of more than 2,000 people).
They also praised her strong commitment to creating a more balanced gender mix in the UK rail sector, and the powerful example she sets to young women considering following in her footsteps.
Meanwhile, she is also heavily involved in a number of organisations including WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) and the Women’s Engineering Society, and is a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) ambassador.
Having commenced her career with Bechtel as part of its gas and oil infrastructure division, her husband’s work then led her to Boston, USA, in 1995, where the company happened to be building the city’s Central Artery highway.
After gaining a taste for transportation projects in Massachusetts, her experience of large-scale rail engineering began in 2003 when she was transferred back to the UK to oversee the construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (now HS1).
She led the critically acclaimed £800 million refurbishment of St Pancras International and brought Eurostar into operational service in her role as project director, before switching to Crossrail where she was the Central Section Delivery Director between 2009-14.
She was appointed as Bechtel’s Managing Director, Global Rail upon her departure from Crossrail, before becoming Bechtel Infrastructure’s MD in Europe and Africa in 2015, and then finally its Global Rail Sector Lead in September 2016.
Since 2014, she has been responsible for delivering a range of foreign projects, including a rail extension in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games, and is currently based in Sydney, where Bechtel is the official delivery partner for the Tunnels and Excavation package of Stage 2 of the Sydney Metro project.
She says: “Having joined Bechtel’s gas and oil sector, I got bitten by the infrastructure bug and fell in love with the tangible difference it could make. I was always very interested in urban transport projects and then I got a big opportunity to manage St Pancras International and the testing and commissioning of Eurostar, before moving on to Crossrail.
“They were both fantastic projects to be involved in. They weren’t just transport projects - they had lots of other interesting facets like urban regeneration, and setting the benchmark for other stations and similar projects around the world.”
Ailie was brought up in a household which encouraged her to pursue a career in engineering as her father was a mechanical engineer and her godfather was a chemical engineer.
In order to encourage the next generation to consider following the same career path, she now employs the simple tactic of letting the impressive scale and impact of civil engineering speak for themselves.
She explains: “I try and pick a couple of stories to tell like how many football pitches we can line up inside a station box, or I might show ‘then and now’ pictures from when a tunnel is dug. It helps people see how much of a difference they can make to the urban landscape and to people’s lives.
“Rail is something that makes a real difference to people’s lives, whether that means getting to work or connecting communities, and as engineers you get to see the tangible fruits of your labour.”
Away from work, Ailie’s hobbies include playing hockey and dinghy sailing, and she has two grown-up children who live in the UK.
On managing her work/life balance she says: “What I tell people who I mentor, or who ask for my advice, is that it’s like juggling three balls. One is family, one is friends and one is work, and when I juggle them I make sure I never drop the family one.”
“Rail is something that makes a real difference to people’s lives”