Mike Jones - Commercial Director

Mike Jones is a highly experienced Company Director with negotiating experience at a strategic level in planning, operations, and investment for railway telecom systems. He also promotes independently operated rail services and led the process to establish Hull Trains, a widely acknowledged success in the railway industry. His skills and experience embrace a thorough understanding of the economic characteristics of railways and the structure of the industry following privatisation.

He joined British Rail in 1964 and after a distinguished career that saw his appointment to many senior railway posts including that of National Business Manager, Railfreight, from 1982-1990, he joined the start-up team at BR Telecoms Limited where he was responsibility for defining the products and services, and establishing price and service levels for the delivery of voice, data, mobile, and private circuits using the railway transmission network. The turnover of this activity was close to £100M per annum.

As BRT became established Mike was responsible for a wide range of investment schemes where he acted as the sponsor. These included establishing the VHSDR network for IP LAN interconnect services, which involved a mesh network of 23 nodes to provide national coverage at some 400 locations. This work involved close liaison with Sema, who at privatisation, purchased the BR Business Systems business responsible for 100 railway applications run from two processing centres.

Mike also held responsibility for the business management aspects of railway national radio network, an analogue system with 600 base stations providing complete geographic coverage of the railway network for use by train drivers and operational staff. Around 10,000 cab radios and handsets being involved generating £10M annual revenue. This system uses the railway transmission network to link up the base stations and provided access to the fixed voice network of 50,000 extensions.

After privatisation Mike continued in the senior commercial role for Racal-BRT and after becoming a professional consultant in 1997 was retained by Racal Electronics plc and latterly Global Crossing to advise on the market opportunities in the rail sector and take the lead in negotiating many of their largest commercial contracts with companies such as Virgin Trains, British Transport Police, National Express Group, and the First Group.