A group of 12 budding engineers from SNC-Lavalin’s Rail & Transit team (www.snclavalin.com) in Derby has won this year’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers Railway Challenge after impressive performances in 10 different categories, including energy storage, traction, ride comfort, noise, maintainability and energy efficiency.

The event was held at Stapleford in Leicestershire earlier this month. This is the second time that a team from SNC-Lavalin has won, after victory in the 2012 competition (albeit under the company’s former name, Interfleet).

Andris Upenieks, one of SNC-Lavalin’s graduate engineers, said: “We are immensely proud of our achievement, and we take away some fantastic hands-on experience of what it takes to make a locomotive from start to finish. Our focus is developing innovative solutions that drive technology forward within the rail industry, so this was a great opportunity to showcase our ideas. The experience will be invaluable in our future careers, and we are thrilled that all our hard work has paid off.”

Bill Reeve, chief judge of the competition, said: “SNC-Lavalin put in an impressive performance across all 10 challenges, and their locomotive performed faultlessly. I would like to congratulate the team for their excellent project management, an innovative design and first-rate operational performance.

“The competition is run along the lines of a real-life tendering process, and I would like to congratulate all the teams that took part in what is an exciting and challenging competition.They had to develop an initial concept and prepare a business case, then finance, design, manufacture and build their locomotive from scratch.”

Second and third places went to TfL and the University of Southampton.