Boss whose job is always on the line

The boss who will bring trams to Rochdale town centre is getting in a little practice...on Manchester.

Hired last year from Melbourne by Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive to triple the size of the network, Aussie light rail engineer Phil Purdy is a man with a to-do list the size of a didgeridoo...and the longer it gets, the happier he is.

His latest task is to dig up and renew the near-20-year-old tracks in the city centre.

And if it wasn’t enough of a struggle to have the city back into some kind of shape for the Tory party conference in October, he has also to deal with a month-long closure of all the lines to the south of the city in October for the start of that expansion programme.

By then, of course, the last train will have run on the Oldham loop line and work will have started on converting it for Metrolink.

Passenger surveys have been done to establish where train passengers are travelling to and from on the line in preparation for replacement bus services. And while all that is going on, the 55-year-old father of three is overseeing the delivery and commissioning of 40 new vehicles, installing more than 200 state-of-the-art ticket machines, building of a new maintenance depot, and preparing to open a dozen new lines.

“There is never a good time to do a job like this,” he says. “But if you tried to please everyone, you would still be planning it in five years time.”

Surveys of the city centre tracks were already under way when Purdy — who started his career as a heavy rail engineer — arrived last May. But it didn’t take a genius to realise that something major had to be done. A high-profile derailment of a tram packed with rock concert fans in June was followed by another on Boxing Day.

The work started in April and will finish in October. Stagecoach runs a shuttle bus service on a management contract and it was the Stagecoach Projects Group which got the £100m Metrolink contract.