Natalie Whitehead
Site Manager, Route Services, Network Rail
Site Manager, Route Services, Network Rail
P eople take some surprising routes to a railway career, but perhaps one of the more unusual is that of Natalie Whitehead. She did a degree in performing arts with the intention of becoming a professional dancer. Now she manages Whitemoor Yard in March, Cambridgeshire, at Network Rail’s national recycling plant, which processes the equivalent of 13 Eiffel Towers of scrap metal a year.
“I live in March, which is very much a railway town. I saw a job for a part-time production assistant at Whitemoor when I left university. It was local and Network Rail enjoys a good reputation in the area, so I went for it.”
Natalie joined Network Rail in 2013 and has made swift progress in the past five years. Her enthusiasm for the job meant that when her line manager said he was thinking of leaving, she asked him to teach her about his role. His mentoring enabled her to rise to site manager in July last year.
“I accept all of the redundant assets that are no longer used or wanted in the railway. They come to me and my team then dismantle and grade them. Obviously Network Rail has standards it has to adhere to, so we grade the assets into either serviceable sleepers or rails, or unusable items.
“If it’s serviceable we sell it back into the railway, so we’re recycling a lot of materials. With the unusable stuff we send it out to be used for cattle walkways or to garden centres for wooden sleepers for gardens - that kind of thing. We also send the wood off, if it’s in a really bad state, to be incinerated, where it gets turned into energy. So we try and landfill only general waste, which is brilliant when you consider the amount of materials that we accept every year.”
Whitemoor recycled 79,000 tonnes of scrap metal in 2016/17, equating to £7.5 million in savings for the railway.
“I get a lot of pride from knowing that if we didn’t do what we do it would all just be waste scattered around the country. Network Rail is publicly funded and we all pay taxes, so knowing how much money we’re saving as a company makes me proud.”
The site occupied by Whitemoor Yard was previously wasteland, so there were already plenty of established wildlife habitats before Network Rail came along.
“We do a lot with wildlife. We have put up bird boxes, for example. We have a responsibility to look after the environment and not destroy the habitats. That’s one of the things we closely monitor. Being adjacent to a town, we also have a lot of neighbours, so we’re restricted, planning-wise, for noise. So I have to actively monitor that on a daily basis to make sure we’re keeping everyone happy.”
This is one of the reasons that Whitemoor only operates from 0700-1600 weekdays; carrying out its activities on weekends or bank holidays would make it quite unpopular with its neighbours. But this is also one of the perks of the job for Natalie because it means she has a great work-life balance and can get home while the sun is still shining in the summer. It also gives her the time to indulge her passion for dancing; she still performs with a local dance group, giving her an opportunity to invite her colleagues along to watch her.
“This wasn’t necessarily the career I was planning on but, now I’m in it, I can’t see me ever coming out of it.
“I’ve never had a degree in a related subject. I know it’s a desirable thing to have but you don’t always need it. I learnt from the bottom up and I had so much support from my manager. He taught me everything I know. You can’t learn that experience from a book.
“So many people rely on the railway, so to know that I’m part of that movement is great. There is so much to learn. It’s not just about trains running on tracks, it’s so in-depth and, just when you think you have all the knowledge, you’ll find that there’s still be so much more to learn. The possibilities in the railway are endless.” n
“This wasn’t necessarily the career I was planning on, but now I can’t see me ever coming out of it”