David Potter

David is an experienced railway director and professional engineer capable of operating at senior levels within an organisation, setting policy and strategy, and delivering business performance targets. He has led both major railway civil and rolling stock engineering projects from both the client and contractor sides of the industry. His experience has included rolling stock, permanent way, and civil engineering procurement, design, and implementation.

David has considerable commercial knowledge and expertise in tendering procurement and negotiation of major civil engineering and rolling stock contracts and was involved at a senior level in the tender for London Underground’s privatised infrastructure maintenance contracts.

David has been involved with two successful management buy-outs. Latterly he has formed his own railway consultancy (Ellipse Management) working closely with First Class Partnerships providing infrastructure engineering and management advice to the UK, South African, Brazilian, and Hong Kong rail networks, to government, network operators, and major suppliers.

A career long railwayman David has held senior positions in Jarvis where he was the Managing Director of one of its track renewal companies; Railtrack, managing the outsourcing of all of the Company’s track renewal contracts; London Underground, managing the procurement and management of over 800 track contractors undertaking daily renewal and maintenance of the system; and latterly as a Technical Board member and Director of Rail for Hyder Consulting Limited a multi-national, multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy company.

Working through First Class Partnerships, David currently provides Board level advice to Transnet, the South African national rail operator and has on-going commitments to provide advice to the UK Government’s Department for Transport and Nexus. Previously he has provided engineering support and interim management to Arriva Trains, Network Rail and a number of other UK consultancies as well as working overseas with CVRD (Now Vale) on rail heavy haul concepts, signalling and train design.

David is an accredited Office of Government Commence (OGC) High Risk Gateway Review Team Leader and undertakes several reviews annually on major projects for the OGC and other Departments.