West Midlands trains boss is announced

Jan Chaudhry-van der Velde as been at Merseyrail since 2015 and before that spent three years as Abellio UK’s deputy managing director.

Mr Chaudhry-Van der Velde said: “It’s a real honour to take on this role at such an exciting time for the West Midlands. The near £1 billion of investment going onto the network over the coming years will deliver significant improvements to our customers’ journeys.

“Performance and customer satisfaction levels at Merseyrail were best in class during my time there, and I’m looking forward to delivering similar improvements at West Midlands Trains.”

He has held a number of director roles outside of Abellio including operations director at South West Trains, commercial director at Southern and operations and retail director at Thameslink. He first joined the sector in 1989 as a British Rail general management trainee.

Dutch group Abellio, with its Jap[anese partners JR East and Mitsui, will be overseeing the investment into the West Midlands network over the next nine years. This includes £680 million on new trains, £70m on depots and £60m on station improvements.

Patrick Verwer, the outgoing managing director of London Midland, will move on after six years at the helm of the business. He made this decision before the announcement of the franchise award.

There will be an announcement on the rest of the executive team for West Midlands Trains before the franchise starts on December 10.

Abellio has a 70.1 per cent share of the new company and JR East and Mitsui own the remaining 29.9 per cent in a 50:50 split.

The new trains and carriages are being made for West Midlands Trains by Bombardier and CAF, creating space for an extra 85,000 passengers on rush hour services in Birmingham and London;

Station improvemen will include more than 1,000 new car parking spaces and 2,500 cycle parking spaces. This is alongside new and refurbished waiting rooms, more seats at stations and feasibility studies into developing new stations in the West Midlands;

A greater choice of travel options for passengers thanks to the introduction of new Sunday services by 2021. This includes services from Birmingham to Shrewsbury.

There will be greater provision of passenger information with audio visual displays on all trains by the end of 2019 as well as 800 new digital customer information screens across the network; All trains will have free Wi-Fi by the end of 2019;