Network Rail starts search for new project and construction director

Friday 17 Jan 2014

Network Rail starts search for new project and construction director

Region & Route:: National

Network Rail today starts its search for a new director to lead one of the biggest project and construction portfolios in the country following the announcement that the company's managing director of infrastructure projects, Simon Kirby, is to join HS2 Ltd as CEO for the project's construction phase.

Over the next five years Network Rail plans to invest some £24bn in thousands of projects around the country aimed at delivering a bigger, better railway enabling more trains to run, at higher speeds with more seats and better facilities at stations up and down the country.

Network Rail's chairman, Richard Parry-Jones, said: "Simon has been extremely successful in his ten years with the company, delivering a large range of landmark projects all across the country. He leaves behind him a strong organisation that enjoys excellent relationships with our supply chain partners. We are very grateful for everything he has contributed and wish him the very best in his new role at HS2. Going forward the two organisations will be working closely together and Simon's appointment will only serve to reinforce that.

"Network Rail's £24bn of projects planned for the next five years continues the biggest sustained investment programme our railways have seen since the Victorian era to maintain the very highest safety standards, improve customer satisfaction, increase capacity by a third into our major regional cities and improve our operational efficiency to maximise value for taxpayers and rail users alike.

"This programme has already seen over £20bn invested since 2009. The scale, complexity and timescales of this huge investment programme make this one of the most challenging and exciting roles in Britain today and we will be looking for the best talent to take over from Simon when he leaves for HS2 in June of this year."

Notes to editors

Over the past five years, Simon Kirby has been responsible for delivering a nationwide programme of improvements to the rail network including:

£550m refurbishment and renovation of Kings Cross, including the construction of the new Western Concourse
£895m scheme at Reading to unblock one of the country's worst bottlenecks and construct a new station
completion of the longest new domestic railway line in Britain for 100 years: the £300m Airdrie to Bathgate line
£130m, ten-year restoration of the Forth River Bridge
completion of the first phase of the £6.5bn Thameslink project with new stations built at Blackfriars and Farringdon
removal of a major bottleneck on the East Coast mainline with the completion of the Hitchin flyover
£100m re signalling and modernisation of the approaches to Nottingham station.

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About Network Rail

We own, operate and develop Britain's railway infrastructure; that's 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations. We run 20 of the UK's largest stations while all the others, over 2,500, are run by the country's train operating companies.

Usually, there are almost five million journeys made in the UK and over 600 freight trains run on the network. People depend on Britain's railway for their daily commute, to visit friends and loved ones and to get them home safe every day. Our role is to deliver a safe and reliable railway, so we carefully manage and deliver thousands of projects every year that form part of the multi-billion pound Railway Upgrade Plan, to grow and expand the nation's railway network to respond to the tremendous growth and demand the railway has experienced - a doubling of passenger journeys over the past 20 years.