“Extreme” heat peaked as teams unloaded their locomotives at Stapleford Miniature Railway in Leicestershire, said Simon Iwnicki, chair of the event’s organising committee. Temperatures rose to about 35ºC during the event, held from 25-28 June.
“The team coming from Lisbon, I think they thought they were coming to be a bit cooler,” Iwnicki told Professional Engineering. “They actually found it was hotter here.”
Set up 16 years ago as a rail industry equivalent to the Formula Student competition, the Railway Challenge asks teams of students and young engineers to demonstrate their skills by designing and manufacturing a miniature (10¼in-gauge) railway locomotive to a strict set of rules and a detailed technical specification.
The locomotives are then put to the test in Stapleford, with a team of senior industry figures judging their performance. The judges were led by chief scrutineer Tim Poole from London Underground.
The team from FH Aachen university in Germany was this year’s grand champion. The University of Sheffield was runner-up, followed by Poznań University of Technology from Poland.
“The scores were very close this time, between those three particularly,” Iwnicki said. “It was really difficult to separate them.
“We look at the locos and think: ‘Wow, that really could be something coming out of a manufacturer’s factory.’ This is the quality and the reliability they’re demonstrating.”
Aachen came out on top thanks to wins in four of 16 challenges: ride comfort, energy storage, maintainability and reliability, in which it shared joint first with five other teams.
“The points were quite close to each other,” team leader Josy Meurer told Professional Engineering. “There were many teams on a very high level competing against each other. We are happy that the judges chose us.”
The team entered an updated locomotive that had previously appeared in the competition. New dampeners contributed to the ride comfort win, said technical team lead René Ebeling, while improvements to the locomotive’s human-machine interfaces included an adjustable driver’s panel.
Ticket to ride
After four debuted at the 2025 competition, this year’s event saw an increase in the number of ride-on locomotives, with six appearing. That increase is “changing the feel” of the competition, Iwnicki said: “In the early years, we didn’t allow people to drive the locomotive by riding on it. They controlled it from a pendant normally, or some sort of remote device, usually coupled by a wire as a safety precaution, and they sat in the coach behind the loco.
“A couple of years ago, we changed the rules to say that we’d allow that. They have to run through some safety procedures first of all, and they have to obviously provide a safe environment within the locomotive for the rider.
“Some of them have made very nice cabs, effectively, for the driver – a professional feel to what they’ve designed.”
Six teams receiving full marks in the reliability challenge also showed an increasing focus on the important factor. Some teams did have issues around their suspension systems, Iwnicki said, rather than the transmission and control system problems that affected earlier entrants.
A new mindset
As with other IMechE competitions for young engineers, the Railway Challenge gives participants a valuable opportunity to develop expertise and experiment with different approaches.
“Getting all the different parts and units to work together in one loco was a great experience,” Ebeling said. “Most of the buses and infrastructure that we use in the small loco are used in bigger locos as well – sometimes I’m surprised how similar the small locos are to the big locos, when I hear from some of my colleagues that I study with.”
The competition can also be very useful for other careers, said Meurer, a business studies student who has now also studied mechatronics. “When you’re coming from business studies, you have a very different mindset than engineers. And so I think to have this interdisciplinarity in it, it’s quite helpful to also understand different mindsets in your later career.”
The event also promoted the possibilities of engineering to visitors, including a Scout troop.
Iwnicki thanked the competition sponsors, volunteers, the Friends of Stapleford Miniature Railway and Lord Gretton, who owns the estate.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.