TL;DR
Twenty Artificial Intelligence Engineering Apprentices have started work across Britain’s rail industry, Network Rail announced on 22 October. They began on 22 September in two cohorts, one in York and one in London. GBRX, the innovation arm of Great British Railways, runs the scheme. About six months ago its rail AI action plan said a lack of skills was holding back adoption.
How the scheme works
The apprentices mix formal training with practical work. Their placements are spread across the industry and coordinated through GBRX’s AI Incubator Accelerator (AIIA), so that capability builds up inside individual rail organisations as well as across the sector. Steph Oerton of DFTO said they would work on real operational problems, from operators running trains to suppliers.
The programme is the third step GBRX has taken since that action plan came out. The other two were setting priorities for where AI could do most good, and creating the AIIA itself.
Toufic Machnouk, GBRX’s managing director, put it bluntly: “A plan on paper will not deliver our ambition, capability is the constraint.” Lord Peter Hendy, the rail minister, called the apprenticeships part of “a new era for the sector” as Great British Railways is set up.
Context
The AI cohort runs in parallel with a much bigger Department for Transport programme: a GBR foundation apprenticeship for 16 to 21-year-olds that will take up to 600 recruits across four years, beginning with a Derby intake. Network Rail alone says roughly 300 apprentices have joined it in 2026, across IT, finance, business and engineering roles.
It is one of several public-sector AI capability stories this week, alongside the National Audit Office’s report on DWP’s AI trials.
Looking forward
In our view, twenty apprentices is a modest start for an industry the size of the railway, and the test of the scheme is whether placements produce working AI tools inside operators and suppliers, and whether GBRX expands intake in later years. The release does not say how many cohorts are planned or what the apprentices will be qualified in at the end.