Company News

By Raymond Shepherd, Technical Sales Engineer

The person who inspired me to become an engineer was my father, James Shepherd. He had originally trained as a sowing machine engineer and worked at the Singer sowing machine factory in Clydebank, before moving to the new car factory at Linwood and retraining to become a die setter. My father new all things mechanical. He maintained and repaired his own car, he stripped down and rebuilt watches and clocks, he repaired all the lawnmowers for friends and family, he was a genuine all-rounder, and nothing phased him.

From the age of 14, I was swapping out car engines with my father – there was nothing we couldn’t do, and we had great fun doing it.

I was very lucky, I left school at 16 with no qualifications, but apprenticeships were plentiful and I had a choice of three or four. Eventually, I chose Govan shipbuilders as a mechanical marine engineer. It was a fantastic apprenticeship that covered a wide range of topics that provided a broad engineering skill set that set you up well for a career in engineering. The shipyard introduced me to steam as one of the contracts was a major overhaul of a large bulk carrier that was steam-driven. I was fascinated by engineering and its history and today I continue to work in a business that has its own proud steam heritage originally on the Clyde and now serving the whole UK.

Steam powered the Industrial Revolution and now, more than a hundred years on, it is still depended on by the medical, pharmaceutical, food, paper, process and many other sectors. Steam has been ever present for the past hundred years and I believe will still be here in another hundred years’ time.

Engineering is such a broad term and encompasses so many different skill sets. At James Ramsay, we have coded welders, we have mechanical engineers, we have pipe fitters, we have heating engineers, we have electrical engineers, and we have service engineers, all of this team have served apprenticeships. They have completed the four or five years it takes to become a journeyman, the term widely used to describe the engineer who has served his or her time and become the one who now passes on the skills to the next generation of young people entering the trade. We have one female gas service engineer, and this shows there are no barriers to entering the trade.

My older son Gary served his time with James Ramsay as a heating engineer and attended Glasgow University to complete his degree in Mechanical Engineering. He is now the Managing Director. My younger son Jamie served his time as an electrical engineer and then retrained as a gas service engineer. He is now the Service Director.

Having worked at James Ramsay as an engineer, an operations director, a managing director, a chairman and now, in my semi-retirement, a humble sales engineer, I have immense pride in seeing a good number of young men and older men make the move into engineering at the business, we still have a good number of engineers who served their time at the business and remain with the company to this day. Adult apprenticeships were a fantastic way of offering older lads and young men a route into the trade when they possibly feared they had missed the opportunity. We have an older gentleman, Malcolm Aitken, moving towards the end of his career who took the adult apprenticeship route well over 20 years ago and we have a younger chap, Colin Bright, who completed his adult training around five years ago and who continues to go from strength to strength. We currently have five or six young apprentices and a commitment from the directors to continue with this recruitment plan.

During my time at James Ramsay, we have been involved in some fantastic projects and I have been lucky to visit places and sites that are of extreme interest. I have been inside most of HM prisons in Scotland, I have walked across the Forth Rail bridge, I have visited nuclear power stations, I have been in the main naval bases around Scotland, I have been in hydroelectric plants, I have been on steam ships on the Clyde, Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine, and I have been in some incredible historic buildings.

We have taken on some great projects throughout the years, including new steam boilers being lowered in through the roof of The Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow, numerous steam boiler installations at distilleries throughout Scotland such as Glen Goyne, Bunnahabhain, Kilchoman, Ardnahoe, Glenfarclas and many others. We are currently installing four new steam boilers in Glasgow’s Barlinnie prison, and we recently completed a project to remove water from the river Clyde for a ground-breaking heat recovery project at Clydebank.

We have a rich history of great engineers from Scotland such as John Loggie Baird (the TV), Thomas Telford (Caledonian Canal), Robert Stevenson (designer of lighthouses) and of course James Watt (the steam engine). Engineering is a fantastic trade that is essential to keeping the wheels of industry turning.