Mark Hopwood
Operations Director, LondonLines
March 20 2006
The inaugural event of the IRO Young Professionals took place on Monday 20th March, when Mark Hopwood, Operations Director of LondonLines spoke to us about his career and what had driven his success.
Mark Hopwood has worked for the railways since graduating from Essex University. He joined British Rail just prior to privatisation and initially worked as Duty Manager at Slough station before going on to work for Network Rail and First North Western.
Mark joined LondonLines in 2004 and initially managed six franchises, when LondonLines comprised of West Anglia, Great Northern, Stansted Express, C2C, Silverlink County and Silverlink Metro. He has delivered significant successes since joining the organisation, notably the turnaround in PPM.
Mark explained the success LondonLines has achieved through reducing delay minutes and looked at comparisons in other countries to show how the UK's rail network should strive to meet higher performance targets.
We were all very impressed by Mark's story which showed just how a Young Professional starting out on the railways can rise to a high level in a relatively short period of time.
APRIL 2006: As a footnote, we would like to offer our congratulations to Mark as he has since been promoted to become the LondonLines Managing Director.
Written by Michael Pead and John Backway.
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