Women in Climate (WiC) network
Women in Climate (WiC) network
Posted by Luisa Fernanda Gomez Vargas
22 October 2026We were delighted to be joined by Julie Gregory for a very interesting session about her career from researching anvil clouds at the Met Office Hadley Centre to becoming the Regional Head of Climate Resilience and Sustainable Growth at Network Rail. Her talk was followed by a lively discussion, focussing on Network Rail’s strategy around climate change adaptation, changing career paths, and part-time work.
Julie obtained her MSc from the University of Reading and then joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in the atmospheric processes team, focussing on anvil clouds and their representation in models. While she enjoyed the research and working with her colleagues, she quickly realised that a pure research path was not for her as she prefers to work to clearer and shorter-term deadlines than those typical for pure research. She moved into a consultancy role at the Met Office which involved a lot of science communication about anthropogenic climate change. She then relocated for personal reasons and got a position as Weather Strategy Manager with Railtrack (now Network Rail). One of the key focus areas was managing risk from leaves on rail tracks, which form a compacted, insulating layer making the tracks slippery and sometimes causing trains to disappear from the signalling system. The team used weather forecasts to plan for and mitigate these and other risks (e.g. by delaying routine maintenance works to run special rail-cleaning trains and increasing staff availability when needed).
Some ten years later in 2017 Julie became Senior Sponsor for the Southwest Rail resilience programme. Her role involved leading five climate resilience projects, assessing risks and making the business case for government investment into making the railway future-proof to the risks posed by climate change such as sea-level rise and extreme rainfall. This brought more of her research background into her job. In 2024, Julie moved into her current role revolving around sustainability for Wales and Western Region. Her team focusses on biodiversity and wildlife corridors, decarbonisation, weather resilience and climate change adaptation. While weather resilience has long been recognised as a priority area at Network Rail, a stronger focus on climate adaptation has developed more recently over the past decade or so, with increasing urgency over the last three years. Options for climate change adaptation include raising electrical equipment above flood levels, taking a catchment-based approach (e.g. managing floods upstream of the railway) and making decisions on where and how to invest in more resilient infrastructure (e.g. making key routes future-proof, assessing future risk during a new assets lifespan and building accordingly, …).
Julie mentioned that as a parent, she has tried a variety of part-time working options. One challenge she found was progressing her career while working part-time. Some barriers included senior staff suggesting that certain roles were “not possible” on a part-time basis. At other points in her career she felt she was not yet in a position to apply for more senior roles while her children were small. She is now part of one of the inclusivity networks at Network Rail, where she advocates for career opportunities and career progression for part-time employees.
Q&A Session:
During the Q&A session, participants were very interested in strategies around climate change adaptation at Network Rail. The other focus of the Q&A session was on part-time work and career paths.
It became clear in the discussion that there is a difficult balance between the funding available for climate adaptation and assessing worst-case risk: While it would be great to adapt everything to the worst case, this is not feasible in practice. Concerning heat-stress, Julie explained that at high temperatures (e.g. 40°C), trains need to run at reduced speed due to the stress-resilience of the tracks. Adapting the tracks for increasing temperatures is challenging, because the tracks still need to work for low temperatures during winter. Another question was around assessing potential risks from climate change to long-lifetime assets given that climate projections typically end in 2100. A lot of assets have a much shorter life span, but it is important to try to estimate the risk when new long-term assets are built (e.g. buildings, sea walls) and to make them as future-proof as possible. Julie explained that adaptation management plans get updated every 5 years which is approximately in line with e.g. the IPCC report frequencies.
Another point was around renationalisation of the train operating companies, which will make it easier to coordinate efforts around climate change adaption across the entire experience of railway use (e.g. from planting trees for natural cooling and to increase biodiversity to designing or adapting station buildings to be better suited for high temperatures). There are also efforts to implement Circular Economy principles, including reducing landfill and reusing ballast (the stones supporting the tracks) by cleaning it when it gets clogged by fine particles. Another interesting point was on international collaboration to share knowledge and learn from other countries: There are some international networks (e.g. UIC) and knowledge exchange partnerships.
Julie says that part-time working options have improved during her 25 year career at Network Rail and a lot of male colleagues are now also working part time. However, gender imbalance is still an issue with about 80% male employees in the Rail industry. She mentioned that it is very helpful when male colleagues and managers set an example of working part-time or mentioning that they are leaving early for childcare etc, because it makes it more normal for everyone. Another topic of discussion was around female employees in management roles often being told to be more assertive and having targeted training to follow a more “traditional” managerial style, however Julie and other participants agreed that being authentic and genuine is helpful because colleagues will often appreciate and respect/trust that management style more.
On up-skilling and moving from pure research into an operational career, Julie mentioned that you often do not need to have the full background (be it climate science or rail operations) because people bring their expertise to the team and upskill each other, and you can learn a lot of things quickly. For example, when she first started, Julie went through the daily logbook of weather-related cancellations/issues on the network to get a picture early on. She also found that her research background was very helpful in quickly summarising and understanding complex information, and she also found it particularly useful in the rail industry when working with engineers.
Links shared by participants:
BBC News Article on “Extreme heat set to disrupt train services across region” (13 August 2026)
Research article “A New Framework to Explore High-End Sea Level Rise for the UK: Updating H++” (Weeks et al. 2025)