There was a time when we had Her/His Majesty's Railway Inspectorate, generally staffed by retired majors and generals, with a career of experience in the Royal Corps of Transport, Railway Battalions.
Straight talking, but often with a pragmatism which recognised what people would do rather than what people should do, and you might find the discussion about the decision to cut up £2m worth of Class 66 loco lying down the bank at Loch Trieg 'interesting', rather than recovering it complete and putting it back in service.
(Story in SoS last week)
@arellcat might well fume however at some of the commentary concerning those who in immediate post-war (39-45) were referred to a dilutees - fast tracked into trades with wartime austerity apprenticeship-lite training, and a current image of a spotty (and intimated to be skirt-wearing) sociology/classics/history graduate parachuted in to engineering management positions <ducks>.
Hence one might conclude that as some in such posts cannot justifyably use the title engineer they need to be called a responsible person, rather than a qualified one.
The modern diffusion of responsibilities and roles is confusing - I've tripped up on this one, as those researching rail level crossings don't now deal with on street tram tracks despite some obvious similarities, whilst both are technically governed through ORR and the same RAIB delivers the inquiries which were formerly the remit of HMRI for both trams and trains, and perhaps (although we've yet to have any serious incident) any guided busways, under the umbrella of Rail and Other Guided Systems (ROGS). It can get very frustrating, and convoluted.
By way of reflection there is another tram project being developed, where the start-up costs are being rather neatly managed down - they have options on DC sub stations being replaced by a power supply upgrade on London Underground - good for another 20-30 years, and have bought some secondhand trams and given them a radical overhaul, again giving a low cost way to get the service running and earn money. If the work programme of the Edinburgh tram had been organised in a slightly different way, we might by now be seeing a shuttle service between Edinburgh Park and the Airport, or a temporary terminus nearby, earning money and getting the trams properly run-in, whilst other work progressively got the route Eastwards.
@arellcat has a couple of pictures which make an interesting comparison between rail and tram building speeds. The foundations for the Stonehouse tram bridge are in place and wayleave corridor for the tram tracks being cleared, but the 4 railway tracks have no apparent presence of 25kV overhead wiring. In a later picture the wires are up and trains running via Bathgate to Glasgow, but the shuttering is still up for the pouring of the tram bridge parapets and the approach embankment not yet finished.
By way of contrast here's how a railway might have laid the off-street tracks... typically for a renewal project this work goes ahead at over 2 Km of plain line per day,
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