Conquering the Peaks in aid of the Railway Children charity

Isabel Morgan-Meade from our Rail team discusses the highs and lows of their recent challenge in aid of the Railway Children charity

As the UK’s biggest rail recruiter, we don’t just serve the rail industry at Morson; we’re part of the rail community too.

Playing an active role in that community is important to us, so when the opportunity arose to take part in the famous Three Peaks Challenge in aid of Railway Children, a charity dedicated to providing a better life for street children, how could we turn it down? Making a positive difference to people’s lives is part of our DNA at Morson, so what’s a few thousand feet and a few hundred miles for a good cause?

Getting involved

The high altitude challenge is not the first time our team has forsaken home comforts to raise funds for Railway Children. I have taken part in their annual sleep out at Piccadilly station in Manchester every year since joining Morson, and my colleagues were doing that before I arrived at the company, but it was only this year that the opportunity arose to take our fundraising involvement to the next level – literally! - by taking part in the Three Peaks.

After volunteering ourselves, our Rail Director, Gary Smithson, and I threw open the opportunity to our colleagues to make up our team of four, and Kieran Donnelly and Jeff Marshall were quick to raise their hands and volunteer. With just a few weeks between signing up and setting off, we knew it would be tough, but nothing could have prepared us for the challenge we were about to face.

The challenge

We packed our bags on the Wednesday evening, ready to tackle the next two days. The idea is that we travel by train as a group of Rail industry supply chain partners to each of the peaks. We met in Crewe, destined for Wales and our first climb at Snowdon, beginning in the late evening and continuing through the night into the early morning. Navigating the rough terrain in the dark with only each other and our head torches to get us to the summit, we were daunted but determined, keeping each others’ spirits up through the rain. No sooner were we back down the mountain than were back on a train, to the Lake District to tackle Scafell Pike, with limited sleep and lots of camaraderie to keep us going.

Ben Nevis, was the third and final mountain. Exhaustion was cumulative and the 10-mile climb on aching legs after limited sleep was probably the toughest thing any of us have ever done. But it might also be the most rewarding. The way we supported each other as a Morson team, and the encouragement we had from rail industry peers tackling the hike with us really exemplified the concepts of teamwork and community. We took on the challenge to raise money for charity – and we’ve raised a four-figure sum so far – but what we’ve learned and achieved goes far beyond the funds we’ve generated.

What we’ve learned

The four of us work together all the time and tackled this challenge as a team, but we arrived home much more of a team than when we left. Out of our usual working environment, we have learned about each other and from each other, which will feed into our ability to collaborate and strive harder at work.

At Morson we believe it’s important to give back, and that’s what we set out to do with the Railway Children Three Peaks Challenge. But it wasn’t just the mountains that gave us more than we bargained for; the experience did too. It taught us that when you give back, you gain as much as you give.