Railways have shaped Europe’s landscapes, economies and the way its people move and meet. Today, with the climate crisis pushing for cleaner and more affordable ways to travel, rail is back at the centre of the conversation about Europe’s future, for both passengers and freight.
But building better railways is not only a technical question. Every line, corridor and station is also a political, social and historical choice, and the engineers who design them need to understand that context as well as the technology.
In the first episode of Season 3, École nationale des ponts et chaussées’ student Ilian Lateb talks with Steve Brown, David Selim Sayers and Anubandh Katé about what rail means for Europe, and why history and the humanities belong in engineering education.
Can rail bring Europe closer together?
The EU’s trans-European transport network plans nine corridors across the continent to improve cross-border connections and bring regions closer together. Projects like Rail Baltica, the Lyon–Turin line and the Brenner Base Tunnel show what collective European investment can look like. For Anubandh Kate, this infrastructure matters, but only as part of a bigger picture:
Railway infrastructure can contribute to a sense of European belonging, but it cannot do it on its own. It can be an enabler.
By making it easier to study, work and travel in other countries, rail gives people the chance to build a personal connection with other cultures. The idea of corridors is not new either. As Steve Brown explains, 19th-century archives from ENPC’s Fradet project show how railway networks were already reshaping Ottoman Europe, turning agrarian landscapes into market towns.
Looking ahead, the guests see a more integrated European network, a return of night trains and more freight moving to rail. They also point to the challenges: reopening branch lines, and the high costs and governance problems that come with large infrastructure projects.
Why engineers should know history
At ENPC, the Fradet project puts 19th-century railway documents in the hands of engineering students. For David Selim Sayers, this kind of work gives future engineers two things: the context to question what their projects are for, and the ability to deal with ambiguity, where there is no single right answer.
We’re not just training engineers at a place like École des Ponts. We’re training decision-makers.
For Ilian, who took part in the project with students from Istanbul and Madrid, it was a surprise in more ways than one. Working on an archive was something he never expected to do as an engineer, and the documents changed how he saw Europe’s past: alongside the wars, there was a long history of countries sharing technical knowledge and working together on railways.
Ilian Lateb
Ilian Lateb is a second-year engineering student in the Economics, Management and Finance Department at École nationale des ponts et chaussées.
Alongside his studies, he serves as Co-Chair of the EELISA Student Council. He is also Business Development Director at Ponts Études Projets, Corporate Relations Manager at La Tribune des Ponts et Chaussées and Vice-President for Partnerships at the Ponts et Chaussées Gala.
Steve Brown
Steve Brown is President of the Language and Culture department at ENPC. Ten different foreign languages are taught at Ponts, including French for our international students, and all students study two languages, including English, for the whole of their programme. Most of our courses use the foreign language as a medium of instruction, and include a challenging course content load, ranging across the humanities, and developing intercultural and interpersonal communication skills in a multidisciplinary approach. Steve has been involved in various international initiatives – a formal exchange programme between another engineering school and Cambridge Engineering, outreach programmes around the theme of ecodevelopment, and was a founder member of the Alliance for Climate Action Now at the Université Paris-Saclay. His teaching interests include mediation, biodiversity and radicality, and his current research focuses on the development of railways on the Ottoman Empire.
David Selim Sayers
David Selim Sayers is a Senior Lecturer at the Language and Cultures Department at ENPC, specializing in Ottoman history. He obtained his B.A. from the University of Cambridge and his Ph.D. from Princeton University before teaching at institutions such as San Francisco State University, the University of Vienna, and HEC Paris. He is a co-founder and core faculty member of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT) and has released a number of books and articles in the fields of history and literature, mostly with a focus on the Middle East, through publishers such as Penguin Classics. At ENPC, David teaches on social sciences (identity politics, nationalism, urbanization), literature (English literature in Paris, fanfiction), and the Middle East (the Ottoman Empire, gender in the Middle East). A native speaker of English, German, and Turkish, David has taught in all three languages as well as French.
Anubandh Katé
Anubandh Katé is a Paris-based Franco-Indian Railway Signalling Engineer with over 16 years of experience working on a wide range of international urban and mainline railway projects. He recently completed an Advanced Master’s degree in Railway and Urban Transport Systems at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC), which helped him develop an interdisciplinary, transversal, and systemic vision of the railway domain.
Anubandh currently works in Alstom’s Supervision Control Center (SCC) department as a Verification and Validation (V&V) Manager. Beyond his professional commitments, Anubandh is passionate about languages, cultural exchange, history, and the social sciences.
