A recurring fastener failure on multiple trains sent mechanical engineer Michelle Tan MIEAust CPEng into a year-long root-cause investigation. This taught her a lot about commercial realities, stakeholder pressures and the courage to take a pragmatic path.
As told to Joe Ennis
While working for a railway operator, I inherited a problem no-one wanted to own. We were commissioning new trains, and across the entire fleet we saw recurring failures in several fasteners – components that shouldn’t have been failing at all.
For three years the failures had been increasing. As the trains were still under warranty, we lodged a defect claim. The manufacturer pushed back, arguing the failures were caused by our track. We believed the evidence pointed to the trains. Initial attempts to fix the problem – changing fastener types, strengths and assembly procedures – did not make a great deal of difference.
So we agreed to conduct a joint root-cause investigation with the manufacturer. In theory, it was the logical engineering approach: understand precisely why something is failing so you can fix it properly. In practice, it became something else.
Each party hired its own consultants to lead the review. It got commercial instead of collaborative, with each set of consultants representing the interests of their employer and neither leaning towards accepting liability.
A year of testing later, while a lot of good work had been done, we still had not determined a definitive root cause both sides could accept. Meanwhile, every failure meant taking trains out of service. This caused a drain on maintenance resources and reduced train availability for operations.
Ultimately, we came up with several mitigations collectively to resolve the problem. However, only later did I fully appreciate the turning point we missed. Before all the investigations, the supplier had offered to explore a redesign of the bolted joint which would have removed the need for the problematic fasteners entirely.
In hindsight, we probably should have accepted that offer. We might not have found the root cause, but the problem would likely have been resolved faster.
It reinforced a fundamental practical principle: sometimes the most technically satisfying path is not the wisest one.
READ: Michelle Tan’s tips for taking the next step in your engineering career
Key lessons
- Know when a problem is intractable and when a pragmatic fix is the better choice.
- Engineering decisions have commercial contexts and consequences. Understand them early.
- Early collaboration beats adversarial investigation. Align stakeholders before positions harden.
Michelle Tan MIEAust CPEng is the National Deputy Chair of the Engineers Australia College of Leadership and Management, and National Deputy Chair of the Railway Technical Society of Australasia.
This article was originally published in the February 2026 edition of create magazine.
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