ON TRACK FOR A FANTASTIC CAREER WITH KIWIRAIL

Maintaining 80 year old machinery and enormous indoor cranes, dealing with exploding cats - all in a day's work for this recently qualified Wellington electrician.

24 year old Jeff Culver has recently finished his electrical apprenticeship.  But unlike many new sparkies, who spend their time wiring up houses and working on commercial sites, Jeff’s based in an enormous factory where he’s helping our country’s rail network flourish again.

“I was originally employed by KiwiRail as a trade assistant, I was working on traction motors and alternators.  This experience was great but I really wanted to complete a full electrical apprenticeship.  Fortunately I was able to switch to site maintenance and complete the National Certificate in Electrical Engineering [Electrician for Registration] [Level 4].” 

Hutt Workshops, where Jeff is based, is one of three major engineering facilities operated by KiwiRail. “An electrical apprenticeship here is different because you’re not going to different sites all the time, but there’s tons to do on the site here.” The site was opened 90 years ago, and that’s how old some of the machinery Jeff has to maintain is.  “It’s really interesting working on that stuff,” he says.  “It’s fun figuring out how to retro-fit it all and keep it running.”

Jeff’s work centres around tool repairs and maintenance of the machines operating on the site.  That includes the massive overhead cranes that run the length of the workshop.  While Jeff enjoys the work, it can also be a challenge.  “Sometimes you open something up and you’ve got 100 contactors staring back at you.  It can be difficult looking at the drawings and figuring out what the fault is and how you’re going to fix it.”

Oddly enough, Jeff’s toughest challenge had nothing to do with alternators or contactors.  “We had a cat that got into a 11KV substation last week – it crawled into one of the 400V switches and just exploded!  I had to clean that out... it was horrible.”

So what are Jeff’s plans for the future? “I’m currently doing the Level 5 Advanced Trade – I’m going to stick with that for the time being.  I completed my inspector’s course last year, and I think the marks I got for that were the highest I’ve received in my entire apprenticeship!”

“The railways [Kiwirail] have a proud history of apprentice training and many of the electricians in New Zealand owe their career start to an apprenticeship in the railway workshops,” says Paul Craven, ETITO Training Manager – Welington. “While the number of apprentices training in this environment is nowhere near what it was, it’s really encouraging to see that the railway workshops are still producing quality tradesmen like Jeff.”

KiwiRail was bought by the government in 2008, and since then has received a $1billion investment from the government to buy electric trains for Auckland and electrify the rail network in New Zealand’s largest city.  When the economy was down last year, this investment meant a number of electricians were able to keep their apprenticeships – it even meant a few new apprentices could start training.  One example of this is Ontrack, who look after the railway signalling network. Ontrack currently have 19 Electrical apprentices.

If you’re a railway buff, you can read an article in NZ Railways Magazine from 1930, after the opening of the Hutt Workshops here.