I recently passed the IRSE Mod A exam - also known as the Certificate of Railway Control Engineering Fundamentals. I’ll walk through how I did it here. The first thing you absolutely must do is go to the official IRSE site where all of the important information is available.
Here are some questions many have asked.
- Can anybody take the test? Yes there are no pre-requisites to taking the test except to pay the test fees before the registration deadline
- Can the test be taken without any course or training? Yes, you can pass the test by purely self-studying
- What is the total cost? For March 2022 it was £110. There is no need to purchase any other books or courses (unless you want to)
- How does one study for the test? Here’s what I did:
- Download, read & understand all of the reading material resources
- Watch study days videos on IRSE’s Vimeo channel
- Find other candidates to form study groups
- Can I see your notes? I structured my notes according to reading materials, compiled important diagrams and studied through ‘Study Days’ questions. They are not complete and I skipped some chapters which I felt I have enough knowledge on.
Study Days Questions
Diagrams
- 1 Syllabus
- 4 Glossary
- 5 Intro to Signalling
- 7 Train Detection
- 8 Interlocking
- 9 Reduce accidents involving human factors?
- 10 Achieving high levels of signalling system availability - secondary systems
- 11 Dependability of Railway Control & Communication Systems
- 12 Railway safety engineering
- 13 Train protection
- 14 Operator Interfaces
- 15 Telecoms (Network)
- 15 Telecoms (Passengers)
- 16 Safe Train Separation
- 17 Safety engineering for rail control & comm system
- 21 Rail control & comm systems management
- 22 Interfaces