Jan Chaudhry van der Velde

Jan Chaudhry van der Velde joined TfW in April 2021 as Managing Director of the rail business, and led this part of the organisation for four years, before handing the reigns over to Marie Daly last April. He has an enormous amount of experience working in the UK railway, in both the public and private sector. After a physics degree at Birmingham University, Jan joined British Rail in 1989 on its general management training scheme, based in Norwich.

Throughout the 1990s, he undertook a series of front line supervisory and management roles, with responsibility for traincrew, station staff, signalling and control staff, revenue protection, cleaning and rail safety.

In 2003, Jan became the Operations & Retail Director at Thameslink, and then Commercial Director at sister company Southern. In 2008, he was appointed as Operations Director at South West Trains. A period of time at owning group level with Abellio UK followed from 2012, where he sat on the board of Northern and was a senior member of the successful bid team for the Scotrail franchise. Jan became Managing Director at Merseyrail in 2015 and then MD West Midlands Trains in 2018 when Abellio won the West Midlands franchise.

Since April last year, Jan has been TfW’s Strategic Projects Director, acting as “senior responsible officer” for the newly formed Network North Wales programme.