Lily Sharp has been working in the rail industry for less than a year, but she feels like she’s found her calling.
A Melbourne native, she’s always been a user of trains and trams, and decided rail would be an interesting sector to get into.
Now, she works as a Technical Officer at the Monash Institute of Railway Technology, gaining practical experience while finishing her studies in electrical engineering and computer science.
“I do a lot of the data flow, especially helping out when there’s code to be written,” she said. “
Monash is great – there’s so much going on, not just at IRT but in the wider university too.
“IRT is so willing to give young people a chance and they’ve been really welcoming.”
Sharp was awarded a scholarship to attend the Rail Decarbonisation and Resilience conference after writing a paper titled Planning around our existing networks to improve ridership.
She explained: “My idea was to not necessarily build more infrastructure, but to focus on what we already have.
“I looked at the size of Australia’s inner-city networks and compared them to city networks around the world that have high passenger numbers.
“I found that London has one rail station per about 20,000 people, Melbourne has one per 18,000, and Adelaide has one per 16,000.”
In Sharp’s opinion, Australia’s rail infrastructure is being underused.
“It’s really about increasing density and the catchment area of our rail networks to get people out of cars and onto trains.”
